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As a provider of cloud storage (who actually owns the infrastructure) this is both exciting and frustrating... Exciting because we love the idea of deploying a 450TB zpool in a 4U chassis ... Frustrating because we will have to keep reworking our price per GB. With that in mind, our new attic/borg[1] support has dropped down to 3 cents per GB, per month to kind-of-sort-of match S3 pricing[2]. [1] http://www.stavros.i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lower air resistance/friction and lower turbulence for the heads.
why it can't be vacuumed?
How well have the first generations of helium drives lasted? I'm wary of trusting my data to something that relies on incredibly good gas seals. But if there are no observed reliability issues, it seems that problem has been solved.
They come with a 5 year warranty and 2.5M hours MTBF rating, which says something about the manufacturer's opinion of their reliability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
why it can't be vacuumed?
In a vacuum, the head would crash into the platter. The gas provides a cushion. Flying height these days is something like 3nm (yes, you read that right), so the tiniest vibration could cause a head crash in a vacuum.
The great thing is that it doesn't use SMR. I have an 8TB SMR from Seagate and its write performance is bad and variable, much like the pre-TRIM SSDs. It's ok if you write a lot of stuff and then just read it (you can get >100MB/s out of it), but I often see small random writes (updates) at 3-4 IOPS, because it has to re-shingle the whole track.
As a provider of cloud storage (who actually owns the infrastructure) this is both exciting and frustrating... Exciting because we love the idea of deploying a 450TB zpool in a 4U chassis ... Frustrating because we will have to keep reworking our price per GB. With that in mind, our new attic/borg[1] support has dropped down to 3 cents per GB, per month to kind-of-sort-of match S3 pricing[2]. [1] http://www.stavros.i…
Dell also has their DSS7000, which is 90 drives in a 4U system, so 900 TB in a single 4U package...
9 Petabyte of storage in a single 42U rack...