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?
(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.
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(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.
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