Is anybody really interested in these? It's been like 10 years waiting HAMR and now finally here. It's more understandable why the delay when you look at all technologies needed.
I'm thinking it would be nice to have an 8-bay NAS that holds 240TB Raw or ~160TB pool in RAID-Z2.
To my thinking RAID arrays have outlived their utility for individual users. With single spinners now so big and so cheap, it’s inexpensive and easy to have massive storage capacity with full redundancy. Need super speedy I/O? SSD/NVME on TB4/5 for current data is basically as fast as direct internal SSD.
I suppose if you don't have much data and you like slow drives. I'd rather have several internal 30.72TB U.2 drives, external RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 NAS arrays and then maybe colo in another state for the 321 storage model. I do know some Apple users that are still using individual external drives.
If I needed a raid array today AND cost wasn’t a hurdle —and perhaps both conditions would exist if I were 20 years younger— I’d possibly have a large Z2 array, but I’d still want offsite redundant storage. For my needs today I am well served by local mirrored single spinners with a TB4 current year working drive, and a single spinber updated regularly and stored offsite in a fireproof safe.
Ideally you have multiple units in multiple locations. I may be responsible for more data than most consumers, but the single drives are just so slow I only use them for cold archives. It's not very encouraging that the HAMR drives are still only 275 on the outer tracks and the 4K random writes don't look that great. The time to write out a whole drive is just getting longer and longer, over a day probably in practical use. Hopefully capacities will continue to increase and then the lower capacities will be more economical.
