this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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So how much data would I lose when it dies?
Edit for those who didn’t read the smirk, yes 36Tb, as a way to point out what someone answered below: if you’re using a drive this big have your data recovery procedures on fleek.
about 36TB?
Nooooooooo not all my pr0ns!!
Assuming you aren't striping, up to 36 TB. If you follow even halfway decent practices with basically any kind of RAID other than 0, hopefully 0 Bytes.
The main worry with stuff like this is that it potentially takes a while to recover from a failed drive even if you catch it in time (alert systems are your friend). And 36 TB is a LOT of data to work through and recover which means a LOT of stress on the remaining drives for a few days.
I think you mean "are striping".
But even with striping you have backups right? Local redundancy is for availability, not durability.
Words hard
And I would go so far as to say that nobody who is buying 36 TB spinners is doing offsite backups of that data. For any org doing offsites of that much data you are almost guaranteed using a tape drive of some form because... they pay for themselves pretty fast and are much better for actual cold storage backups.
Seagate et al keep pushing for these truly massive spinners and I really do wonder who the market is for them. They are overly expensive for cold storage and basically any setup with that volume of data is going to be better off slowly rotating out smaller drives. Partially because of recovery times and partially because nobody but a sponsored youtuber is throwing out their 24 TB drives because 36 TB hit the market.
I assume these are a byproduct of some actually useful tech that is sold to help offset the costs while maybe REALLY REALLY REALLY want 72 TBs in their four bay Synology.
Been a long time since I set foot in a data center; are tape drives not still king for cold storage of data?
It depends on the size/"disruptiveness" of the company but yeah. You either have your own tape back up system or you contract out to someone who does and try not to think about what it means to be doing a glorified rsync of all your data offsite every week.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say anyone doing genuine offsite backups using a spinning disc is wrong but...
The caveat I'll carve out is the hobbyist space where a lot of us will back up truly essential data to a cloud bucket or even a friend/family member's NAS. I... still think that is more wrong than not but (assuming you trust them and they have proper practices) it is probably the best way for a hobbyist to keep a backup without worrying about that USB drive degrading since it gets plugged in once a year.
I can't criticize other hobbyists. I only back up locally and I use Synology Hybrid Raid to do it.
I wouldn't buy a Synology but either way I'd want a 5 or 6 bay for raid-6 with two parity drives. Going from 4 bay (raid 6 or 10) to 5 bay (raid 6) is 50% more user data for 25% more drives. I wouldn't do raid 5 with drives of this size.
Was this a typo? I would expect that almost everyone who is buying these is doing offsite backups. Who has this amount of data density and is ok with losing it?
Yes, they are quite possibly using tape for these backups (either directly or through some cloud service) but you still want offsite backups. Otherwise a bad fire and you lose it all.
It would probably take days to rebuild the array.
It's important to also note that RAID (or alternatives such as unRAID) are not backup systems and should not be relied on as such. If you have a severe brownout that fries more than two or three drives at once, for example, you will lose data if you're not backing up.