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from the now-more-storage-and-still-with-enterprisey-stuff dept.
HGST, a division of Western Digital, has announced its second 10 terabyte helium-filled hard drive. The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 , announced back in June, was a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive. Now HGST has launched the Ultrastar He10, a 10 TB helium-filled HDD using traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). With a total of 7 platters, each platter stores around 1.43 TB. AnandTech reports:
Hard drives are struggling to reach the 10TB capacity point with traditional PMR technology. While Seagate did announce a few 8TB PMR drives earlier this quarter, it really looks like vendors need to move to some other technology (shingled magnetic recording or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)) in order to keep the $/TB metric competitive against the upcoming high-capacity SSDs. As of now, helium seems to be the only proven solution causing minimal performance impact and HGST appears to have a strong hold in this particular market segment.
Ars Technica has some speculation about the price:
There's no price listed for the Ultrastar He10, but it'll probably cost about £600/$800. The first helium-filled drives were extortionately expensive, but the He8 is now down to around £400/$550, which isn't bad for an enterprise drive (these things have a 5-year warranty and other such niceties, too). Seagate's shingled 8TB drive is much cheaper (£170/$200), but you get a shorter warranty and less enterprisey stuff.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday December 03 2015, @03:58PM
Wonder how these He drives handle high altitude. I was once on a project that ran into a problem with the thin air at high altitudes. Put a conventional hard drive in an unpressurized compartment and take it up to 17,000 plus feet, and it will soon fail. They need air pressure to function. The problem was resolved by building a special pressurized enclosure around the hard drive. Expensive, and a good deal of trouble, but at that time, SSDs were still in their infancy, didn't have the capacity needed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 03 2015, @04:06PM
If the pressure inside the sealed (but not completely sealed) helium drive is less than normal atmospheric pressure, wouldn't it be fine or even better at high altitude?
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(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday December 03 2015, @04:52PM
There's a reason such commercial items state minimum / maximum temperatures, minimum / maximum G-force etc. and even sometimes altitude.
17,000 feet is not a "normal" altitude. Putting it on a plane is probably vibration more than anything causing it to fail, not to mention static.
I'm sure pressure plays a part too, but when you put things outside their spec, the only way to find out if it's going to work is to do it. A catastrophic failure of the drive, though unlikely, is something you won't be able to do anything about if it happens at 17,000ft.