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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 mendax on Thursday December 03 2015, @10:52AM
The article failed to mention that Seagate drives tend to be shit. I've bought my last Seagate drive. Writing things down on paper and filing them in my tame black hole filing system is more reliable.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:05AM
I think the article is full of hot air.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:12AM
You obviously need the cloud. Let Amazon buy all the SSDs, HDDs, tape, etc. and let them sort it out.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:17PM
That's a fact, pretty much anything Seagate over 500GB? Its a dead drive walking. I've thrown so many of those damned drives away from people's PCs that when somebody brings in a PC with a failing drive? I just automatically assume its a Seagate and am right a good 9 times out of 10, they are just fucking garbage.
But something many guys here may not know is WHY they are garbage, after all once upon a time Seagate Barracuda was THE drive to get, especially among gamers and those that really worked the hell out of their drives...so what happened? Well this is the rumor that went around the builders forums but considering how many times their rumors turn out to be better than other places facts? I tend to believe its true. Anyway the skinny is that when Seagate bought Maxtor they got a REALLY cheap ARM controller out of the deal, we're talking so cheap you could build 4 Maxtor controllers for the price of a single Seagate controller, so what was the catch? The catch was to drive costs that low they pretty much skimped on everything including safety features for the chip and the drive and when that little ARM chip got hot? Not only would it keep getting hotter and hotter until it cooked itself but once it got warm it tended to lose its little mind and would forget the drive layout so it would bash the heads against the spindle and just shit data anywhere.
Now remember how when the Seagate 1TB drives first came out it was a crapshoot whether you got one that worked or crapped out? That was because they were using up the Seagate controllers and switching to the Maxtor, there was even a list on the builders forums of what batches to look for so you could get one with a Seagate controller. Now when management found out, being the greedy assholes that they were, they refused to go back to the Seagate controllers or give the engineers time to try to figure out a way to fix the Maxtor controller, instead they forced the engineers to try to "fix it with firmware". Remember when all those sites were advising Seagate owners to update their firmware, which until then was something enthusiasts only ever did? Yeah that was them trying to patch it out, which just like the Nvidia/HP "bumpgate patch" was really just them trying to jury rig the drive so it would last just long enough to get past warranty, IIRC all they did was crank up the head parking and low power state which wears out the motors quicker but lets the drive cool off in the short term which they hoped would keep them alive just long enough to get 'em past the warranty.
So if you want to know why Seagate sucks to this very day and why I'll happily buy a used Samsung or Hitachi over a new Seagate at the shop? There ya go, the management there is so fucking greedy that they are still using the Maxtor shit controllers because it "saves" them a few Shekels in BOM while passing on the true cost to the customer. That is also why certain Seagate drives are still good such as the Seagate 500GB, the Maxtor drive wouldn't play nice with the thin design of the Seagate single platter drives (remember the Maxtor has heat issues and the single platters really doesn't give any room for dissipating heat) so they kept the Seagate controller on those drives. So if you want to know in terms of how reliable I rank drives based on what I've seen at the shop? Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, WD, and dead last Seagate. the Samsung line was built like damn tanks, still have a ton of them running in industrial settings and was impressed enough I still have 3TB of my 6TB in my personal PC running Samsung, Hitachi and Toshiba and both rock solid, WD is more iffy than the first 3 but their externals seem to hold up rather well, and Seagate? Well the only thing I use them for is scratch drives for customers that make large temp files like my engineer and audio/visual customers, I wouldn't trust actual important data to 'em.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by J053 on Friday December 04 2015, @01:21AM
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday December 04 2015, @12:52PM
Their Constellation drives are using the Seagate NOT the Maxtor controller, so that really is not surprising. Its a damned shame but when the bought Maxtor everybody thought it would end up with Seagate quality being brought to Maxtor which would then be the "value" line, kinda like Squier is to Fender, instead Maxtor brought the consumer side of Seagate down to their craptastic level.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @12:22PM
When WD bought out HGST, they had to sell off then-new 1TB Platter-based drives off to Toshiba. I wonder if this model is based on the same platter.
BTW, cramming seven platters into a single unit means hotter operation and heavier mechanical stress. You should stress-test this thing before putting into production, and given its capacity, it will take a long time to test each.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:27PM
These actually run cooler than normal drives due to the concurrent use of helioseal/helium gas. Look at the TCO chart in the anandtech article. 8 racks, 1920 hdds use 10 kw of power vs 15.4 kw for 6 TB air filled drives and 17.3 kw for 8 TB air filled drives. Other articles show similar benefits for helium drives like operating temperature and vibrations.
Seagate has created a six platter drive without "resorting" to helium. I am not sure about 7 platters:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/186624-seagate-starts-shipping-8tb-hard-drives-with-10tb-and-hamr-on-the-horizon [extremetech.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by WillR on Thursday December 03 2015, @02:31PM
BTW, cramming seven platters into a single unit means hotter operation and heavier mechanical stress.
That's why they fill the case with helium - much lower friction than air, so they can pack more platters in without changing the heat/power budget.
I would worry more about lifespan of the seal than initial stress testing, helium is notoriously difficult to keep contained.
(Score: 1) by J053 on Friday December 04 2015, @01:26AM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 04 2015, @05:30PM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=10929&cid=271402#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
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(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.