HGST now shipping 10TB drives ...

[jgreco]

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...acity-10tb-helium-drive-new-flash-drives.html

Looks to be an exciting Q4.

 

[cyberjock]

WD made the same announcement too. WD went a step farther claiming that by 2017 all drives manufactured by them will be He filled. Not sure if I like or dislike this idea. The reality is that He is actually in very limited supply on Earth. It is typically trapped in rock when digging in the earth and it's been so cheap up until recently that it wasn't even worth reclaiming because of the cost. Being that He is a light gas it rises up in the atmosphere and is carried away by the solar winds in our solar system.

I know there's lots of talk about stockpiling He, but the reality is that there isn't much left to use. Last I heard the total "obtainable" He on the planet is only good for another 50 years or so, assuming no new uses for He are developed. The reality is that He is extremely important for medical equipment and other very technical industries.

I kind of feel like it's a waste to He fill hard drives...

 

[jgreco]

WD ~== HGST

 

[9C1 Newbee]

My chem professor hit on that He point briefly. Kinda scary thinking we are loosing it.

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, I'm reading that the amount of He in a hard drive is a fraction of the amount of He in a balloon. In particular a hard drive contains He that is at a slight vacuum compared to atmospheric pressure while balloons are at a positive pressure. So maybe it's not "as bad" as it sounds. If someone said that 1 mole of He was used in a balloon and it takes 150 hard drives for the same amount of He to be used I'd feel much better about it. :P

On the flip-side I am curious to see how He filled disks will affect disk reliability. One of my "concerns" with hard drives has been the fact that they were open to atmosphere. Granted there was a very high grade filter at the pinhole, but I always wondered if an airtight hard drive might improve lifespan. Especially if using an inert gas. In the past this was impossible because as the drive temperature changed the hard drive would pressurize and that would cause problems for the head since it rides on a cushion of air to operate. It would be nice to see hard drives suddenly last 8-10 years as a "typical" lifespan vice the 2-5 we see now.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I never realized drives were open to the atmosphere. Makes sense now that you explain it. I hope the filter keeps out cat and dog hair.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, that hole that says "do not cover" ...

 

[cyberjock]

I never realized drives were open to the atmosphere. Makes sense now that you explain it. I hope the filter keeps out cat and dog hair.

So check this out. The hard drive head has tension that pushes the disk into the platter. When any surface moves it creates it's own "skin" of the "fluid" around it (in this case, air). This is called the Bernoulli effect, read up on Wikipedia if you want to know more. For hard drives, and at standard air you can get a fairly good range that works well when engineered with a proper head. The disk spins and you end up with air that "sticks" to the platters. The head then rides on this platter. Ideally the head would only touch the disk when it is spin down (ever wonder why we don't recommend shutting down servers and such.. this is one such reason). Anyway, if the head gets too close it gets pushed away from the platter and if it gets too far it loses buoyancy and the tension from the mechanical arm pushes the head back within close proximity. For many disks the cushion of air the disk rides on is about 75 MPH in relation to the stationary head. A "head crash" is when a hard drive has the head physically hit the media while it is rotating. This is obviously very bad. There are lots of variables to deal with however. As atmospheric pressure changes based on your elevation on the earth, solar wind's impacting on the atmosphere, cold and warm fronts, temperature, etc all of these affect how the "skin" of air behaves on your platter. How much, I don't know. But they are definitely there.

Some of the newer (and better IMO) hard drives park the heads completely off the platter on a loss of power and the head won't move onto the platters until the disk spins up. This means that ideally your head will never come in contact with the platter (which can only be good, right?).

So with He you have different resistance, different thermal properties, and different "skin" because of the properties of the fluid. I would presume that He would allow for the head to be closer to the media (both a good and bad thing) and obviously He provides superior cooling (this is probably a good thing). I wouldn't be surprised if He disks were even more susceptible to damage from slight motion while the disk is in motion but provides longer life when installed in a Chassis with all screws installed and tight (notice I didn't say rubber grommets to absorb noise). We've all had that external SATA drive hooked up to our USB port with one of those converters and had to pick up the drive to move it and we'd do it very gently. It's possible that these He drives could be seriously damaged by that kind of thing. I don't know and only time will confirm or deny my guesses.

I do hate the new "shingled magnetic recording" drives though. The technology just scares me.

I do like the idea of HAMR technology, but time will tell how reliable and how dense the technology will go. I tend to look at shingle technology as the current stop-gap because of delays with HAMR technology but the need for bigger disks. I think once HAMR comes out shingle tech will die pretty rapidly.

We may find that the 40C "thumbrule" for keeping drives healthy and happy can be increased to 45C and we may find that we shouldn't let the hard drives cool down to some low temp like 20C. He has the possibility to upend many of the hard drive physics, thumbrules, and such that we have previously taken for granted based on decades of knowledge. These are definitely interesting times for the hard drive market.

Time will tell though!

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Lot's of really cool information there. Caused me to google.

CLIFF NOTES: From what I gather, HAMR stands for Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording. It is an old (1950's) technology that is hard to implement. These new drives will use fricken' laser beams (Dr Evil voice) attatched to their heads. What this does is heats a small area of the disk. The heat changes the magnetic write characteristics of the record media, enabling a MUCH higher areal density.

HAMR could eventually increase the limit of magnetic recording by more than a factor of 100. This could result in storage capacities as great as 50 terabits per square inch.

Seems pretty clear, spinning platters are here to stay, due to brute storage capacity. SSD's certainly have their place. They won't be snuffing out HDD's any time soon.

Now I will be paying extra attention in class, trying to apply my new found knowledge to these He drives. This discussion couldn't have come at a better time for me.

 

[cyberjock]

Seems pretty clear, spinning platters are here to stay, due to brute storage capacity. SSD's certainly have their place. They won't be snuffing out HDD's any time soon.

Yeah. In the last 5 years SSDs have gone from pieces of crap that were a mortgage payment to almost cost-effective solutions for standard computer users. Some website predicted that if that rate of growth and cost decrease continued SSDs would be "on the same turf" as platter disks between 2017 and 2020. But, the reality is that the growth we've seen is not sustainable at present and there are multiple obstacles to overcome between now and then. You can't keep shrinking forever and without changes that 2020 project is overly optimistic.

Yes, platter based media is here to stay. I'd say "tiered" storage that uses platters and SSDs to provide a total high-speed and high-capacity server are definitely the "long term". SSDs will almost certainly overtake hard disk drives by 2025 or so, but that's anyone's guess.

 

[jgreco]

We've all had that external SATA drive hooked up to our USB port with one of those converters and had to pick up the drive to move it and we'd do it very gently.

Speak for yourself.

 

[jgreco]

Yes, platter based media is here to stay. I'd say "tiered" storage that uses platters and SSDs to provide a total high-speed and high-capacity server are definitely the "long term".

Disk is the new tape. SSD is the new disk. We'll be using platters for storing large amounts of largely sequential data.

I never did understand the reason that you'd sell a laptop with a 1TB HDD in it. It'd be stupid to put lots of data on a portable device with a high damage/theft/etc risk profile. Yet the laptops I bought earlier this year for one of my businesses aren't even sold with an SSD option, but they'll happily put in a 500G, 750G, or 1T HDD. Even allowing for the fact that with 16GB they're big enough to run VM's, I only put a 480GB SSD in them and that was only because I thought it'd be nice to carry around the full library of ISO's we normally keep on a fileserver in addition to several VM's.

Why the hell are they still putting spinners in laptops?

 

[adrianwi]

I agree with the earlier comment about wasting a finite supply of He when I could be diving with it :D

 

[9C1 Newbee]

I never did understand the reason that you'd sell a laptop with a 1TB HDD in it. It'd be stupid to put lots of data on a portable device with a high damage/theft/etc risk profile.......

Why the hell are they still putting spinners in laptops?

Laptops are the new desktops. Most people use a laptop as a sole storage center for all their ish. Just because it is not smart, doesn't mean people won't be shopping for a laptop with storage enough for all their porn. So why spinners? Because they are relatively cheap and your average buyer doesn't GAF. Even with my limited knowledge, I am way more savvy than your average consumer. Most of you gurus on here are in an even smaller category to where you are not even considered from a marketing standpoint.

 

[Houe]

WD went a step farther claiming that by 2017 all drives manufactured by them will be He filled.

Quit spreading false rumors. They did not say that. Only drives used in corporate data centers are switching by 2017.

 

[danb35]

Is there a reason you needed to resurrect a thread that's been dead for over a year to make this point?

 

[Houe]

Is there a reason you needed to resurrect a thread that's been dead for over a year to make this point?

Didn't notice the age when I replied.

 

[adrianwi]

I don't like the He reference. I like diving with it, and at this rate the prices will rocket :D

 

[RoboKaren]

I wonder what the lifespan of the He drives will be. Gasses don't like to be confined and can find ways of sneaking out and leaking.

 

[solarisguy]

Anybody here with 10TB disk experience ?