I think these are gonna be too little too late for the platter drive market, especially with SSD capacities skyrocketing recently (thank you 3D NAND). Toshiba and Samsung both have announced plans for 128TB SSDs within the next 3 years - I can't really see platter drives competing with that.
HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#52Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lower air resistance/friction and lower turbulence for the heads.
So, what will happen if it leaks? Will it just get slow or stop working?
The helium reduces resistance which results in lower vibration of the read/write heads, which in turn allows for reduced space between the platters and the heads, which allows for a reduced space between the platters and more platters per drive.
If the same drive was filled with air rather than helium, the increased vibration of the heads would cause them to crash into the platters - which would scrub the disk clean (which would be bad).
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better than party balloons. Where is the hedge fund investing in long term storage of helium?
I thought that was the problem with helium, it's hard to store because it leaks through everything so easily
The USG had/has a store the National Helium Reserve [1]. It was being sold off so I am unsure how much is still in it, but to answer your question you store it underground.
Edit. It looks that the National Helium reserve will be sold off by 2018 [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. Wikipedia goes on to say the head could crash into a fingerprint or _smoke particle! So... how did my spinning rust laptop drive ever survive on my lap?
A HEPA or the like quality air filter to equalize air pressure, which doesn't pass much air anyway.
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> at say 1/10th atm Nitrogen would seem to work But then you have to have a case strong enough not to bend under the pressure difference. At 1 atm, of course, helium has much lower density (and therefore lower viscosity). Nitrogen weighs 28 g/mol; helium just 4 g/mol.
What about Hydrogen? Too reactive with metals?
Very much so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement And it's generally reactive stuff.
Helium is a nice, nonreactive noble gas.
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#57As 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…
Which of Attic or Borg would you recommend for new usage? Deduplicated always-incremental backups have appealed to me ever since I started following the development of obnam, and I'd love to switch away from duplicity and stop requiring periodic full backups.
Yes, that's the reason everyone is eschewing duplicity (which we've always loved and supported) for attic and borg.
borg appears to be much healthier as a project, has a lot of steam behind it, and has some additional flexibility in block sizes, etc., so we think that's the train to hitch your wagon to ...
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you go past the 45 drive JBOD (which costs $2000 give or take) the price per slot starts to go up quickly ... the last quote we had for the supermicro 90 drive JBOD was $9000. So if you are optimizing for rackspace, it might make sense, but if you're keeping costs down, the 45 drive chassis is the best bet.
Have you considered using the Backblaze pods?
Yes, from the very beginning, but they are based on SATA expanders and have relatively very poor performance. They are really built specifically for that workload and not for a lot of other storage workloads.
That was depressing circa the first BB pods where there really wasn't another option (other than using a Sun Thumper/x4500, which we also considered) ... but now the chassis options from supermicro are so good - ranging from 45-90 drives - that it's not a problem at all.
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
45 drives @ 4TB, but we create 15 drive raidz3 vdevs, so we lose 3 drives per vdev ... so (45-9)*4 = 144TB.
Any reason why you're not using 6TB yet? Reliability?
We like to match drive types in chassis and sometimes cabinets - that way we don't have 8 different kids of spares to juggle. Right now we just happen to have a lot of 4TB arrays in use.
But yes, we will deploy arrays with 6TB very soon.
Re: HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that was the problem with helium, it's hard to store because it leaks through everything so easily
The USG had/has a store the National Helium Reserve [1]. It was being sold off so I am unsure how much is still in it, but to answer your question you store it underground. Edit. It looks that the National Helium reserve will be sold off by 2018 [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...
Fascinating, thanks for the detail!