Greetings from across the pond near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Another great video. Please never let petty criticism drive you off of RU-vid -- you are way too professional to let that happen. Even if you walked on water, there will always be a small percentage of folks that would say, "Look at Chris -- he can't even swim!" (I hope that makes you smile!) Keep a stiff upper lip (the English are very good at this), head up, and for heaven's sake keep going. You have plenty of supporters and constructive comments that swamp ANY petty criticism. Maybe it's also good to remember your subscribers are very detail oriented people, and that can be a very good thing. So some will notice the petty mistakes, but I don't think they mean any harm whatsoever. I guess it's just in the nature of detail-oriented people. They really do love your videos as well, or they wouldn't be watching.
I'm running next cloud on my old notebook. 1TB on the HDD bay, another 1TB on the DVD-ROM slot using the conversion bay. 1TB is my used HD before I upgrade my other notebook to SSD.
Great drives using the old IBM, Hitachi tech.. The problem is that their warranty is not good in certain countries.. Fine in big countries but is a pain in smaller counties..
I have a 2 TB drive that I have a quarter filled with my music collection and all scanned documents. It's amazing what video production will do for disk space needs.
Even if you're not producing but storing other videos acquired through sailing the high seas, you'll need more storage because a 1080p movie nowadays can be as big as 20 GiB, and a music album on HiRes Audio (which I find overkill and snake oil personally) can be as large as 5 GiB! Sigh...
it's amazing how far we have come with HDDs as I remember as a little kid in the early 80's my mother was an oncall 24/7 ATM repair tech for a major bank here on the US east coast, so being a single mother she would sometimes have to wake me up in the middle of the night to go with her if my sister was at my dad's place, or staying with a friend, and I remember going to their data center one night after a computer crash, and she told me how much their 10MB HDD cost them about $100K if remember correctly, and they weighed as much as a small TV also being almost as big, which still blows my mind 🤯to this day again at how far we have come with HDD, and storage tech in general. As always Chris great video. 👍
@@matthewharris517 Congrats would you like a cookie? Also that's nothing in my first laptop a Zenith DataSystems Supersport 286e I have a 20MB(MEGA BYTE) HDD still working booting up a custom version of MS DOS 2.13
@@ExplainingComputers You never know with all the RGB LED stuff going on inside PCs. Might be one of the reasons why I avoid them almost like the plague. xp
it's wonderful to see how technology evolves, especially if you also meet a person who explains everything to you so wonderfully. Thank you for everything.
Wow... Drives up to 32TB !!! My first PC had a 300ish MB HDD and I remember thinking "How I was going to ever fill up this vast storage space" ... hahaha. Amazing.
Having gone from audio tapes to 170k floppy disks on my C64, I was stunned when I used an IBM PC XT at work, with a 10MB hard drive. That same drive would today be hard pushed to store a couple of big photos.
my first personal, 4GB, (the biggest one work place at the time 2GB, most where still well IN MB sizes), Well next 4GB feel a like slow and under size 80GB, (what never going read full, how wrong was I) I have flash drives, larger capacity sizes, in my pocket?
My first hard drive was 20 MB and cost $600. It included an external case and power supply with ISA interface card. I thought it was a bargain. But all I had to do was wait 40 years.
Many years ago, when I ran a Commodore Amiga, I remember reading that its hard drive interface would support drives up to 4 gigabytes, followed by "but no-one will ever need that much storage" 😂
Indeed the Amiga never did. The OS was about 32 MB when you had full production setup with tons of software installed. (exept ofcourse later os4x and devirates who can go up to a whopping 500 mb) but then all you needed is the software wich was slim and efficient. Office suits, Painting, Email and Browsers, Audio studios, you name it and you still had 3 GB free for Data.
The 32 TB Seagate drive is not SMR. It is HSMR. This allows you to choose SMR or CMR for every 2GB region across the stroke. You can use it as a full CMR drive
Many years ago we had a customer request a 1GB hard drive. We only stocked those in one of our regional stores, so I had to drive there to pick it up and get the commission. I remember sitting there in the parking lot totally in awe of this thing and telling myself that I would someday be able to have one of these for my own.
I remember a 10 meg drive and when i got it thinking that the thing was Huge and that i would never use it up in 1983 and it cost a fortune with the IBM XT WOW have things Changed
What an absolute pleasure to listen to a professional CALMLY discuss technology. TBH, I never thought I'd be watching another spinning rust video, but here I am, 17 minutes and 46 seconds later having thoroughly enjoyed the show!
Not sure if I've seen Allen the key before. Welcome Allen. I've said before and I'll say it again, how nice to see someone on RU-vid speaking in paragraphs without jerky cuts every 5 seconds. You even left in the bit where you went to reassemble the unit the wrong way, and who can honestly say they've never done that? The only visible camera trick is the occasional fast forward when doing up screws. The most relaxing and reassuring computer channel, and one of the most informative.
Toshiba drives for me have always been great. Reliable, fast and reasonably priced. Im currently an N300 4tb in my custom built omv nas and had an x300 4tb before which i accidentally broke the sata connectors clean off of, pins and all during a motherboard upgrade that required the drives removal. Also have a 4tb wd blue as a cold backup, and i circulate older 1 and 2tb drives for my offsite backup, although i will likely pickup a third 4tb at the end of the year as my offsite drives are nearing a decade old at this point.
I have 8 of those 16tb Toshiba's in my NAS. A little noisy but they a have good track record with backblaze. I have been running Toshiba drives for years and have been very happy with them.
I just recently bought a 4TB drive for backing up. I thought it's huge enough for me and you just bought a 16TB drive. Now my 4TB drive looks like a 500GB drive.
The problem with huge drives is that when they fail you lose huge.. So when I bought a 4TB drive I actually bought two of them, one is mirroring the other.
I hav around 30 drives but they're all the same 2TB pre-seagate Samsung model. Not perfect, but quiet & more reliable than others I've used. Seagate have a 100% failure rate, & WD hasn't been GR8 either =P
you had a floppy for your C64! I had an old tape recorder and no access to tutorials other than the standard user manual. Would end up copying code from magazines without really understanding the code its self, especially 'machine code' routines to add explosions and such.
19 дней назад
@@markhackney3305 I geeked out my C64 in 1983 and eventually had 2 floppy drives, a cassette tape recorder and the extra memory cartridge. It was my main driver when I was at the CCM at Mills College, Oakland, working on a Masters in Electronic Music. My friend Jeff also had a C64 and we connected them so they'd run off one clock so we'd have a 6 voice synthesizer. We wrote a lot of Basic programs to run machine code number tables and the MusiCalc synth & sequencer. We also played 2 keyboards and 2 guitars and did a lot of performances in the Bay Area and Seattle. Ha ha! Those were the days of poke and peek!
@@markhackney3305 Same, mum would get them for me from the newspaper, and you could write code from a magazine which would run a primitive program or action.
When plugging in a new hard drive for the first time, I like to open CrystalDiskInfo and take a screenshot of it saying 0 power-on hours, and 1 power-on count.
Yup you can also check out other drive health (SMART) parameters from other apps like HD sentinel. These are especially useful in the long run to understand drive motor health, presence of bad sectors etc
Yup you can also check out other drive health parameters from SMART in other apps like HD sentinel. These are especially useful in the long run to understand drive motor health and the presence of bad sectors.
Yup you can also check out other drive health parameters from SMART in HD sentinel. These are especially useful in the long run to understand drive motor health and the presence of bad sectors.
You should mention that selecting default allocation unit size during formatting will not allow you to utilize the entire disk space, if you only use a single partition. For disk of such size you need to select allocation unit size of at least 8kb. I had to reformat my drive, after discovering I was unable to utilize over 200GB of disk space because of this setting.
yep, worthy of research... as matching data size to the typical application can increase performance as well as utilizing the storage capacity. If you are using notepad, it doesn't matter too much, but if you have your SQL server set to 32k clusters, it's probably best to match that with disk allocation at 32k as well, for example. Happy Sunday!
Greetings Chris. Way back in the late 90s my first PC was a 386SX with 4Mb RAM and a 80Mb Conner Hard Drive. Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 5.0 took like 25-35Mb, leaving me with about 40Mb... Had lots of games and software copied from my friends with floppy disks. Eventually I reached 10Mb space remaining, and resorted to MS-DOS DriveSpace, although it was slower and consuming some of the 640K memory, I could squeeze some extra space... THE GOOD OLD DAYS.... Crazy how things evolved. Thanx Chris for another informative and entertaining Sunday afternoon.
Sorry Mr. Barnatt, but I've been working out on the road playing bass with our band! Just now got home at 6pm Sunday night, Texas time. I'll be watching your video tomorrow morning with a full comment and like! Can't wait to watch!
My first HDD was 52MB (49MB formatted) but even with 32TB drives, there's still never quite enough storage. It's always worth spending a bit more on storage IMO.
My first computer that supported a hard disk was an Atari 520 ST. The 600 dollar drive available for it could hold 20 megabytes, which I thought was a lot at the time... but that is roughly 838,861 times less the capacity of your 16 TB drive. Amazing that in 35 years technology has progressed that much!
Ah, that brings me back to the good old days of my Amiga 500+ (I still have it, and it still works :)). I added an 80 MB hard disk to it. I don't remember what it cost, but I do remember it had a whopping 2 MB/s speed, a vast improvement compared to the 20 KB/s floppy drive.
@@Bonez0r Yes, floppies were exponentially slower than even the slow HD of the 1980's, kind of like HD are over six times slower than the slowest SSDs that are currently sold!
You mention the hesitation about purchasing a massive hard drive at such a price and it reminded me of the first hard drive I bought which was 5 megs and was for a Heathkit H89...I think it was in excess of $1000 in 1979ish which is inconceivable today. Great video!
I've been in the PC game for years and during the 1990's worked at NEC and then DEC. In 1994 upgraded the HDD in my work desktop PC with (wait for it) a 500 MB drive. The explosion of storage capacity, both rust-on-Aluminum and Flash has been mind boggling over the years. Our poor man's home server is a recycled T420 Thinkpad laptop. Four-ish years ago I stuck a 2.5" 2TB HDD in the DVD/CD slot for bulk storage. Those HDD enclosures look fantastic. I'll have to look into it if I need to replace my existing suit of external HDDs
I recently replaced several 6TB of my NAS drives with a 16TB drive. With the old drives they would only spin up when needed. I found out that Enterprise drives are designed to run 24/7 and should not be spun down. So using them for backups where they are spun up and down a lot, won't be too good for their health.
I had a used Toshiba HDD in my gaming PC for eight years. And replaced it with a new 6TB Toshiba drive, before it ever died. Just didn't want it dieing on me while in use. They're the best drives as far as I'm concerned.
Since early 2000's I've always used Western Digital HDD's. They were always solidly built and lasted almost forever. But since 2016 I've bought a 3TB blue (used only as an external storage drive) and it failed within 3 years. I bought a 4TB Black and an 8TB Black as internal storage drives. Both developed a horrible continuous "clunking" noise at idle after a few months. I ended up using them both as external storage drives. While I no longer use HDD's in my newer PC builds, there's still a place for them. Sadly, I will not be buying anymore Western Digital drives. I might be looking into Toshiba HDD drives in the future, thank you, Chris! 😃👍
My first PC back in the 1980s had a 20MB (yes, MEGABYTE) external HDD with a 60MB tape-backup drive built in (Tallgrass Technologies model TG-2060). Gigantic thing, half the size pf the PC itself. The tape was almost as large as a VHS tape. 😂 It was cool because I could have two floppy drives *and* a 20MB hard drive -- back then they didn't have half-height floppies, so if you wanted a hard drive, it usually meant you had to replace one of your floppy drives. And now we have available over 30TB in a 3.5" wide 1" tall package. Insane!
Sunday greetings. The storage upgrade videos always take us long time PC users to the nostalgic place. My first PC had a drive with 20 GB hard drive back in the 2000s because 40 GB drive wasn't that much affordable.
I have been using these for a few years, theyre the best HDD in my experience, 5x16TB MG series and none has had any issues. They can be a little noisier but the reliability and speed more than makes up for that
I would indeed prefer to use this particular series in a 24/7 operation and not as single backup drive. The firmware of enterprise drives will stop trying to read a difficult to read block and send a message to the controller to recover the data from the array. If you don't have an array you might not get your data. On the other hand I would not use desktop drives in a drive array because one drive might be thrown out of the array by the controller if it spends too much time trying to recover a block where that data is actually still available in the array. So yes, horses for courses. Choose the right kind of drive for your application.
Great Video as always I always get excited when I see storage media! those LaCie cases are seriously tough and overengineered! It’s like they were designed to survive a nuclear blast. Definitely makes you appreciate the build quality, even if it’s a bit of a challenge to open up. On another note, I recently built a NAS with 4 x 4TB drives in a RAID Z1 configuration, and it’s working great! The performance is solid, and it gives me a nice balance between redundancy and storage space. 👍😃
Thanks Chris for a thoroughly enjoyable video, I like the solid look of the LaCie drive enclosure it's well engineered & supplied with plenty of ports! My first computers HDD was only 3GB running W98 SE in early 2000 & I thought that was a lot, how things have changed in 24 years, where to next? I'm glad to see the appearance of Allen the key :)
It's mind-blowing how storage has evolved. I built my first machine in the first half of 2007 with 250GB from WD; I still have that one in my possession. Also 500-750GB was the best at that time. I ponder where SSDs will be, come the end of the decade... as currently 8TB is the most I've seen in either 2.5 or M.2 size. Also, a setup tip from me: Chris is right that the default allocation unit size is suitable for most users and mixed-purpose volumes, but if you know you're going to use it for a specific or dedicated purpose, for example video-editing or a Steam game library, set it larger (e.g. 128/256KB). Doing so can help reduce fragmentation and improve sequential speeds (to an extent). Also, don't bother with 0.5K, 1K or 2K, as many drives now use the 4K advanced format standard and doing so will result in emulation and dreadful throughput (speaking from experience...). If in doubt, there's a tool called ATTO Disk Benchmark, that can visually-illustrate what might work best if you have a real need for speed.
The only drives I regretted buying were some WD. I had three in a RAID5 array. After a year one of the drives failed so I sent it back to WD under warranty. Three days later, before I could rebuild the array, a second drive failed taking all my data with it. And the replacement drives WD sent me were remanufactured, not new. I’ve never bought another WD storage device since and that was 25 years ago. I favour Seagate now.
WD learned their lesson with remanufactures, and stopped doing that a long time ago. Seagates have a higher fail rate, run hotter, and until recently were a lot slower. But I wonder what size your WDs were. If they were over 32GB and formatted FAT32, that's not the drive, it's a documented bug in FAT32 that if the partition is over 32GB, causes data wrapping that mimics drive failure, which happens as soon as any data is written past the 32GB limit. This is why FDISK was originally limited to 32GB partitions, but about the time the 40GB drives came out some idiot at MSFT removed the 32GB limit, and then we had a rash of "failed" hard drives, almost all WD because at the time they had the only drives over 32GB.
I also have never regretted getting new - bigger storage. My first upgrade was from cassette tapes to a 32MB hard drive for my TRS 80 Model 1, I think around 1979 or 80. If I remember correctly it was about the same price as your new 16TB drive
Nobody ever regretted buying too much storage. When I bought my first HDD, I thought about it for quite a while before deciding that I would spend the extra and get the 20MB. Mind you, in those days, before consumer level digital images and music, that was a lot of capacity, as even text files had less overhead than these days. Long may your disks spin.
Great video Chris. Never had any luck with Toshiba drives myself...so wishing you better outcomes! You may want to check the SMART data value for Helium level from time to time.
@@ExplainingComputers While I've always favored Western Digital drives, I've always known Toshiba drives to be well made. Every Toshiba drive I've encountered was in use for decades without incident. Seagate is the one I've had nothing but problems with. I've seen dozens of failed Seagate drives over the years, usually less than 10 years old when they failed. But each of us has different experiences, so YMMV. Thanks for the video! My favorite part was when you said "...many more years of Explaining Computers episodes."
That's a reasonable price for that much storage. HDDs really amaze me just how big they've become, they just keep sqeezing on more bits per inch with mind-bending physics. Now they're heating up each region to be written to with a laser pulse, just incredible! I've got a 6TB in my PC and an 8TB desktop drive for backups, I think one or both are Seagate SMR drives.
I do the same thing, 1 TB to 4 TB, trust me you can never have to much in this day and time. I still some of my drives from 10 years ago and they still run great.
I have a LaCie 'biggest disk' 2TB drive (2x1TB disks as 1 volume) still in use. Three 500GB 'big disk's are retired, but it's fun to see the big one still working
The timing of this video is perfect, I have been shopping for a new drive to increase our home systems backup capacity. As always,another very good video!
Thank you Chris! I love these simple installation videos. Only true nerds will understand how satisfying upgrading an old hard drive to a bigger capacity is!
Love the hardware stuff! Good grief, the drive capacities have gotten large. Currently looking at an external 4TB backup drive myself, the 1TB drives aren't enough anymore. Thanks for another great video Chris. 😎👍
I kind of yearn for the simple times when you logged on at a terminal connected to a minicomputer and someone else worried about the details. So much more Zen than the clamour of modern computing.
That was fascinating, brings me back to my first PC, an IBM AT Compatible. It came with a 20 Megabyte half height Microscience Drive, and I thought I would never fill it up. It cast more than the PC $AU 1200. It was in the 1980s, we have come a very long way.
While a I was at school (UK) we sent in digital data to go on the new. Doomsday book project, we used a BBC micro. That was the start of my digital journey
@@unvergebeneid Well... that's basically what they are, right? Just a bit of a fancy tape drive? Besides the fact that the "tape" is metal, it functions the same way. I wonder if anyone has tried recording regular audio to a hdd. It would take some specialized software, but I wonder if it's been tried.
With all drives I always run a full manufacturer's diagnostic sweep on the drive before utilising it - this size of drive could run up to a couple of days to run the sweep, it's more comprehensive than just doing a standard format usually. Haven't used too many Toshy drives so far but the ones I've used have all gone in without a flaw, good to see 16's in the sweet spot placement too. BTW - FWIW we've found that drives of this size have worked in the old HP Proliant Microservers (have had one put into an N40L and it worked happily). For more DIY systems some of the lower end a case like the Antec VSK-4000B-U3 has a slew of 5.25" slots too (which can take adaptors to fit 3.5's, sometimes even 3x3.5's into a 2x5.25" socket if the fins allow it). I know a guy who is putting in 8 drives into one at the moment, 4x onboard SATA ports and a PCI-E 4x sata card make up for a very low cost solution all up; you can use this as a storage tank and send it to sleep with a remote command and wake it up with a WoL magic packet command over the network so this storage-tank PC can be located well out of the way and away from dust ingress, toddlers' fingers and errant cats hell bent on destruction.
I will have to check out this drive. It is utterly massive. My first hard drive was a Western Digital 256MB drive back in the early 90s. For the most part, I have always preferred Western Digital and Hitachi.
I started with a Spectrum +2, and then a Amiga with a second floppy. A HDD was a ridiculous luxury. And that A1200 ran a multitasking 32bit OS nicely from a couple of 880k floppies and 2mb of ram.
Thanks Chris and great to see unexpected friends “MR PHILLIPS, MR SCISSORS AND COMPANIONS” being used to upgrade your data storage systems. I forgot the computer scientist who stated that 500 megabytes would be the maximum capacity back in the 1950’s ,but I need a couple of those 16 TB drives myself to update my old video tape collection alone….😮😂! Have a great day!
I recently did a similar thing, except I'm poverty-stricken so I bought a used ex-server 8TB WD Ultrastar (only 14 months use, 11 power cycles) and a cheap enclosure off eBay. I'm very happy with the result although I wouldn't necessarily recommend this route unless you're feeling brave or poor. Total cost was £110.
I've got a pile of like-new salvaged 3TB SAS drives... I have the SAS adapters, need to figure out how I'm going to mount them up (and find an OS and driver that will play nice with Just A Bunch Of Disks, I don't do RAID and it has to be NTFS. Win10 threw up all over the Win10 driver...)
@@spodule6000 Because I once spent a summer with a hex editor, recovering a friend's photo collection that had been mangled by a RAID failure (files all striped together, had to extract and stitch the pieces back together). 14,000 files, I got back 95%, but it was a lot of work. I don't need the performance, just large static storage that's ready to hand via my local network. Redundancy... well, see above. I'd rather have directly redundant copies that don't depend on RAID (which IMO needs to be backed by tape).
@@spodule6000 And I can swap drives as needed, no need to worry about disrupting anything. I just happen to have a matched pile of drives, but I also have an even bigger mismatched pile...
I bought a couple of 14TB Toshiba NAS drives a couple of years ago. They are N300s. They are CMR. I've been running them 24/7 (with light use.) I haven't had any problems with them. They were like 100 AUD less (each) than comparable Seagate drives at the time I bought them.
To be able to collect all my 1TB disks in to one disk, I recently bought a 20TB MG10 and I swear I remember exact same sound from 20~ years ago. It is a Fujitsu!
I always ran a full error scan on new hard drives that checks for any bad sectors. I didn't know performing a regular format did the same thing, good to know!
Like you, Chris, I find Firewire 800 connectivity very useful given the number of functional legacy systems I have that support it. Unfortunately, it's been getting increasingly difficult to find Sata HD enclosures that support FW 800, which had me looking into the Lacie d2 Quadra model seen in this video. I did find several used units listed on eBay, (U.S.), though nothing that didn't include the cost of an installed hard drive. All the more glad I stocked up on a few Mercury Elite enclosures that allow for easy drive swapping when left open. They've worked with drives as large as 10TB, so I expect they'll handle even larger capacity drives. Again, like you, I've never regretted investments in storage, and will probably snag a couple of the Toshiba MG08 16TB drives based on the success of your testing.
I've got a collection of hard drives going back to the late eighties including a 5.25" full height SCSI drive that once ran a BBS on an Amiga 2000. I've only had one go bad on me, a Conner drive. I still have all kinds of software and various documents stored on them including a lot of old programming. I probably should pull it all off and store it on newer media like this drive.
I've had my first SSD die on me today, it kept freezing and crystal disk info said 77% after a week of health 89% but it came up with no errors. Replaced it and all good. I did back up the data as soon the symptoms comes
Great video Chris. In 1992 my system had a 130mb hd. We've come along way. I now have more storage than I'll ever use. Unless you create videos like you do, how much storage does a person need? I've got 50k in photos and thousands of docs and I'm only using 300gb. And I'm quite disappointed in cloud storage services like dropbox. I think self hosting is the way to go.Thanks Chris!
