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janrinok
on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:42PM
from the remember-when-they-said-spinning-drives-were-finished? dept.
from the remember-when-they-said-spinning-drives-were-finished? dept.
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has announced the Ultrastar Archive Ha10, a 10 terabyte helium-filled shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drive. It rotates at 7,200 RPM and has a 256MB cache.
HGST has also released libzbc, "a simple library providing functions for manipulating disks supporting the Zoned Block Command (ZBC) and Zoned-device ATA command set (ZAC)."
The new drive is intended for enterprise bulk storage that is infrequently accessed. SMR tracks are partially overlapped which can hurt drive performance. The Ha10 has lower sequential write speeds than the He8. Seagate has already released 8 TB SMR drives.
What's next? 12 TB? 16 TB? HAMR?
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HGST Announces Delivery of First 10 TB Helium/Shingled HDDs
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(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:56PM
Primer on helium HDDs [extremetech.com]
They use less power than air-filled HDDs because of the lower air resistance. You can't simply use a vacuum because the read/write head has to glide on a cushion of gas. WD/HGST was able to fit 7 platters rather than 5 in their helium HDDs, but Seagate was able to fit 6 platters in an air HDD [extremetech.com] so it's unclear how much the helium is a factor in increasing platter density/count. Warranties on the helium drives are high, so it seems the "HelioSeal" works (and doesn't leak immediately).
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:34AM
Why Helium, and not Hydrogen? Seems like a perfect waste of a rather hard to obtain gas.
Seems more likely Helium allowed the faster spin rate, at the same or less turbulence, with less power, than having anything to do with actual density.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:46AM
Hydrogen is reactive and would leak even faster than helium does.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by iwoloschin on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:52AM
Is Helium that hard to obtain? I was under the impression that you can recover a lot of Helium from natural gas operations, formed by alpha decay of radioactive elements such as Uranium/Thorium. Or by stealing balloons from children.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:03AM
The helium shortage is far overblown, and the amount used in these drives is trivial. A "standard helium tank" fills 10,000 hard drives [hgst.com] according to HGST. I'm stumped on the volume but I think that fills far less than 1,000 party balloons.
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(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:50AM
A friend releases Helium balloons. (Hey, everyone needs a hobby.) From this, I can tell you quite definitively that the quantity of balloons that can be filled by any given tank is akin to the length of a piece of string or the number of pictures which can be taken by a digital camera.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday June 13 2015, @02:05PM
Length of a string in nanometers? Throw out a number instead, IDK
Point is, it does not take a lot of helium to fill a hard drive. Not surprising since most of the hard drive is filled with hard drive.
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(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday June 13 2015, @08:43AM
Stealing balloons from children was the preferred method for obtaining Helium. However, this has been made considerably more difficult due to social media. Whatever trick you devise to obtain a balloon invariably fails to work on their friends.
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:57AM
Might have something to do with hydrogen being combustible.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:15AM
If the drive is sealed it doesn't matter anyway. It's like those "dangerous" refrigeration machines filled with natural gases. It may ignite but it's too little blow you up.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:43AM
Sealed but with electrical current going every which way all throughout the drive? Buy a dud that arcs out somewhere inside and then have the brownie-sized equivalent of a pipe-bomb running in your tower.
The performance gains would be worth the risk!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:51AM
I wouldn't be worried about the little bit that would be in a hard drive blowing me up. I'd still be worried about the 10TB of data though.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:55AM
I dunno, I could imagine a data center full of Hydrogen drives being a scary place if there was an earthquake. Even if there was no danger, I imagine the paperwork involved in shipping something potentially explosive, and doing all the safety testing required to prove that it won't explode would be prohibitive. In any event, surrounding your biits with an inert gas is probably best even without any human safety factor. The safety of the bits is what matters most, and Helium won't generally have any sort of chemical reaction with the platters or heads. Or anything else.
(Score: 2) by bryan on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:42PM
Also, storing hydrogen in a metal container can lead to hydrogen embrittlement [wikipedia.org] as the gas slowly leaks out through the metal. Turns out, being the 1st element on the chart, the hydrogen atoms are really small and hard to contain (in gas form anyway).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:22AM
Hydrogen is a hard to contain gas. And helium cannot be that hard to obtain, given that children's balloons get filled with it. Nobody would waste a hard to obtain gas for children's tools which furthermore lose it in a short time frame.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:32PM
Hydrogen is a hard to contain gas
Exactly. H2 is so small that it diffuses through metal (e.g the platters) and makes it brittle [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Friday June 12 2015, @01:03AM
If there's a buck to be made, sure this civilization will use up just about any finite resource.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 13 2015, @09:05AM
Finite != hard to obtain.
A hard to obtain resource is expensive (because it costs much money to obtain it). And you cannot make a buck by using expensive stuff for cheap children's toys.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 13 2015, @03:15PM
Or you could use cheap resources on wasteful products only to have important products expensive at a later stage due to shortages and thus more expensive extraction.