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HGST Announces Delivery of First 10 TB Helium/Shingled HDDs

posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the remember-when-they-said-spinning-drives-were-finished? dept.

takyon writes:

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:57AM (#194775)

    Might have something to do with hydrogen being combustible.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:15AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:15AM (#194779) Journal

    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

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:43AM (#194789) Homepage

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:51AM (#194791)

      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

      by forkazoo (2561) on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:55AM (#194829)

      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

    by bryan (29) <bryan@pipedot.org> on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:42PM (#195025) Homepage Journal

    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).