Helium-filled disks lift off: You can't keep these 6TB beasts down WD subsidiary HGST's first helium-filled drive goes on sale today: the 6TB Ultrastar He6, which is the highest capacity 3.5-inch drive available. Instead of the platters spinning inside an air-filled enclosure they rotate inside one filled with helium gas, 14 per cent of the density of air. This has a much lower level of …
Why welding? Is helium so magic there is no gasket that can contain it?
I would imagine the main change from normal drives is sealing all mechanics to the "helium side". No drive axles coming through, no pressure equalization vents (so the case has to be sturdier than usual). This also has the benefit that the whole unit can be dipped into a cooling fluid.
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Graham's Law: The lower the vapour density, the faster a gas will diffuse.
This is not really new. I recall working at ICL when they were producing "New Range". One of their tech triumphs was a 100Meg Disc drive with the actual platter/head chamber filled with pressurised Helium.
They were the size of a fridge-freezer.
Made a change from the old ED30's 30Meg drives the size of a washing machine, with replaceable "Cake-cover" 14-plate disk packs, and the heads driven by hydraulics!
I know some cryo folks who make deuterium bullets who have given background on what a pain this is...
In my personal experience, replacing N ,O is a good idea anyway. In my AFM experiments we use pure N to get rid of the of the moisture in the air.
I don't want to buy into the marketing bilge, but it may be possible that these drives may not fail as often?
Less opportunities for rust? Microbes? Dust? Oh, and the speed of sound is ~3x normal air....
Now, how long will it take to check this drive....?
P.
> the speed of sound is ~3x normal air
Oh, interesting point, hadn't thought of that. Is the sound barrier a problem for harddisks? A quick back-of-the-hand calculation suggests rotation speed in a 7200 rpm HD should be in the region 20-25 m/s, a far cry from the speed of sound (343 m/s), but I may be mistaken.
I am big fan of "Spinning Rust" but it is mechanical, I still have ST506, MFM, Xt/At drive mechanisms here, but surely SSD are a body blow to these big drives, as more big drives will become SSD, expect easier to seal, and useable in Space ....
I just bought a Seagate 4TB drive, but the Samsung A840 512GB SSD is still my new favourite ...
Your SSD (500Gb Samsung) Retails along the lines of nearly 300.00€
Any other spinning rust that in theory will last ya till time perpetuity (i.e. The limited number of NAND Flash R/W Cycles) @ 500Gb will only set ya back a cool (Lets just round it up call it) 40.00€ then shall we?
This is why SSD fails so hard... The Prices are just to damned HIGH!
@Michael Habel - "This is why SSD fails so hard... The prices are just too damned HIGH!
SSDs are not, objectively, more expensive. In Australia, I can get a 256MB SSD for $250. For the same price I can get a 2TB SATA drive.
The SSD is not more expensive than the SATA drive; both are $250 (AUD). What you are referring to is $/MB and, in that regard, SSDs ($1/MB) are indeed a poor choice compared to standard SATA ($0.10/MB).
However, capacity, while always in demand, is not always the most important metric. Running a database, you may instead require a certain speed, commonly (though not always 100% helpfully) measured in IOPS. If that is the case then $/IOPS becomes more relevant and SSD ($0.04/IOPS) starts looking like a steal compared to SATA ($3/IOPS). Even more so when you consider the power and extra SAN shelves you will need to deliver that throughput from SATA drives!
Of course this difference is one reason why SSDs and conventional, spinning-platter drives are often deployed together. Few larger organisations use purely one or the other and it's even pretty common in home PCs and laptops to use an SSD boot/system disk backed by a SATA drive for bulk storage.
Note that I have used some fairly generic numbers for all this as they're good enough to illustrate the point.
Remind me again Math isn't quite my strong suit but IIRC 256Gb =/= 2Tb.
256Gigabytes vs 2,048 Gigabytes a net lose of 1,792 Gigabytes Of storage that you could've had for your $250.00(AUD).
So tell me again how much a Spinning Rusty Platter @256Gb's sets ya back! This should be your One true Benchmark, and not some top-of-the-line HDD...
*Edit*
Bottom line is Joe blow, with Windows 7 Home Premium could care less about running Databases, While it may well truly faster then conventional Tech. It hardly makes it better, or to the benefit of everyone, mainstream.
Good question. I do not believe so.
With your voice the pitch is determined by how fast your vocal chords swing which in turn seems to be determined my the density of the gas around it.
In a harddisk the pitch is determined by the speed the platters rotate, this is controlled by electronics and doesn't change with outside conditions.
melt at 7200RPM, in a futile attempt to squeeze any semblance of performance out of it.
* More platters means more area subject to friction with the enclosed gas (be it air, helium or whatever other concoction you may come up with.
* Larger platters mean larger edge velocity (turbulence again, see above), unless you keep the spindle speed down.
* More platters means more heads means more arms means the head positioning thingamajig has more mass. Which means your actuator has to scale up accordingly, taking way more power.
* Larger and more platters means more loading on the spindle bearings, and any slop there will cause bigger excursions at the platter edges. Which the heads won't quite agree with, plus it will cause more turbulence, which again the heads won't agree with, and take more energy to overcome that friction.
I was clearing out my old computer equipment earlier this year and found my 6gb Bigfoot, I'd forgotten just how massive & heavy the thing was!
It's rather amazing how quickly harddrive technology has developed, I got 4 WD Green drives for a NAS and doing initial tests on them (filling up drive and reading it all back to check data integrity & read/write speed) I had them just sitting flat on the desk, they barely got warm and were as quiet as a mouse, and all 4 drives running in the NAS make less noise/heat than a few year old 500gb drive I have.
Seagate states that most of their drives are designed for a maximum operating altitude of 10,000 feet. If the seals on these helium-filled drives hold at altitudes higher than 10,000 feet, these drives could operate in places where most Seagate drives are not warranted to work. Good for folks in Bolivia, for instance...
No, it wouldn't. Vacuum is not thermally conductive for convection, and the platter surfaces are cooled by the gas (air, helium, whatever) inside the drive. Helium is more thermally conductive than air in addition to being less dense, hence less drag and better cooling allow more densely packed platters.
What really surprises me is the 5 year warranty on the model. This is normally reserved for the expensive enterprise grade drives. Does that mean the He6 will be substantially more expensive per TB than the air-filled 4TB model? Or is Hitachi offering the extra long warranty as a sweetener to help customers swallow the technology that hasn't been tested for long-term reliability yet?
Either way, the size is just getting silly. The RAID rebuild times with drives like this are inevitably going to be waaaaay outside anything sensible.
"Either way, the size is just getting silly. The RAID rebuild times with drives like this are inevitably going to be waaaaay outside anything sensible."
1: Raid6 - but that's only just sufficient for the task these days.
2: ZFS RAIDz3 (Yay!) - which should be good up to about 100Tb drives.
In general though - yes you're right. There's a reason larger SSDs are moving to RAIN structures internally.
"2: ZFS RAIDz3 (Yay!) - which should be good up to about 100Tb drives."
Yes and no. With 6TB disks based on unproven bleeding edge technology, I wouldn't want to push my vdev geometry past 4+3 in RAIDZ3. If you really meant 100Tb (as opposed to 100TB), I'd say you were overly optimistic.
Just to expand on Natalie Gritpants' comment: a fundamental principle of hard disk drives is that the heads float a tiny distance above the platters on a cushion of air (or helium). They are not like floppy disks where the heads rub against the surface - neither heads nor surface would last long if they did.
No. It's very hard to hold a vacuum. lots of things start to evaporate at very low pressures, including things that you thought were solid.
For example in CRTs, you need a reactive element (called a getter) that reacts with an trace gasses in the tube as they are emitted from the various parts of the tube, just to keep the vacuum. Apart from the problem of it not staying a vacuum, you may also start to have problems with some of your components evaporating away causing failure.
No, because the heads are spring loaded and pressed against the spinning platter. The fact that they are shaped like mini aeroplane wings causes them to fly above the surface of the disk on a cushion of air (or helium in this case). If there is more vibration or shock than the air cushion can absorb, the head "crashes" into the surface of the disk and bits of the surface that are dislodged stick to it spoiling the air flow (both of that head and any others that the little bits of debris get wafted towards) which causes it to have less lift and so it hits again and again until it can fly no more, and that is a head crash.
So there has to be something in there for the heads to fly in.
It's a tiny amount of inert (non-poisonous) gas which is less dense than air so as soon as it escapes it will float away from you rather than suffocate you. If you're that paranoid you shouldn't allow an aerosol can in the house - that contains liquefied gas (i.e. there's a lot more of it) which is also inflammable and denser than air.
Helium is a finite resource just as natural gas is a finite resource. And aside from a small portion of natural gas deposits with elevated concentrations of Helium, it typically only appears in relatively trace amounts. Once it escapes from containment, it rises to the upper atmosphere and is lost into space. Creating Helium in a laboratory environment is prohibitively expensive for large-scale use. Sure, Helium might not become rare enough in the next couple decades to be an immediate issue, but eventually its price is bound to rise to a level that will impede its use for many scientific and industrial purposes.
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Helium is cheap because the US govt is dumping all its reserves at knock-down price that has not changed since 1996, despite a massive increase in demand. This distorts the market. Given it's limited supply, and limited rate of capture, some estimate that the true market value of a helium party balloon should be close to $100. Once the US has no more helium to dump, expect the price to rise and availability to decrease dramatically. This proflicate use of artificially cheap helium will end with exorbitant running costs for MRI scanners, and anything else that involves superconducting magnets and very low temperatures. So expect many more undiagnosed brain tumors and the like, all for the sake of "privatising" this rare asset, and venting it off into space for a few seconds of amusement.
Once the US has no more helium to dump, expect the price to rise and availability to decrease dramatically.
Ah, the sound of yet another government-fuelled bubble (helium filled this time) popping as the laws of economics reassert themselves. Good! Be advised that there will be whining about "exploitative capitalism" from clueless gasbags.
Noam Chomsky: "There are supposed to be laws of economics. I can't understand them."
James Ostrowski: "You are correct, Sir! If you stay away from economics and political theory,. I will stay away from linguistics."
Funny you should say "laws of economics" rather than "economic forces". Because, with the way that the various world economies have been going, it doesn't seem like we actually know the laws well enough yet - unless they are the sort of unfalsifiable laws where whatever happens, that's just what the laws said would happen. Funnier yet, there are psychological studies where students of economics prove to be less altruistic/fairness-minded, and more self-interested, than "ordinary" students in financial dealings... but supposedly the same laws of economics apply to both economists and lesser mortals.
Sure, profit motive will draw private companies to fill the gap after some amount of price flapping and pain among industrial and scientific users of helium. But was it really necessary for the US Government to get out of the helium marketplace in some ideological panic, lurching around smashing stuff on the way out? Oh well, after the US Government shutdown last month, that would seem to be totally par for the course.
I'm pretty sure HP had a "fixed head disk" (128 disk heads in a fixed position) back in the late 70's that was also helium pressurized. I remember the tanks sitting next to the disk drive.
The fixed heads were used for maximum speed for the OS, no "seek time".
I was around back then. I can check my CE handbook tonite if no one else can find the reference.
Yes HP did use a fix head Disc drive in the early 70s filled with helium I think made by Vermount, as well as a fixed head drum. I went to Tehran once to fix one. Both about 3mbs with microsecond track switching, good for virtual memory catching. Cant remember if it had 128 heads plus some spares or 512.
The Computer Museum at Bletchley park may have one. No tank, that was in the service kit to refill it.
Have to check my CE handbook as well.
I guess the demise of magnetic drives is not as soon as I thought. I don't trust magnetic drives because of the enormous range of the MTBF rates. It's hard to get the real numbers from the manufacturers. That said, I've found that MTBF for SSDs may not be as lofty as we were led to believe. Speed it great, but reliability is more important. Backup of Backups is the only answer.
Personally, I'm skeptical about this new development . What happens if the seal is broken? Will the drive still perform? For most applications, 6TB is backup storage fodder where speed is less important than reliability.
I guess the demise of magnetic drives is not as soon as I thought. I don't trust magnetic drives because of the enormous range of the MTBF rates. It's hard to get the real numbers from the manufacturers. That said, I've found that MTBF for SSDs may not be as lofty as we were led to believe. Speed it great, but reliability is more important. Backup of Backups is the only answer.
Personally, I'm skeptical about this new development . What happens if the seal is broken? Will the drive still perform? For most applications, 6TB is backup storage fodder where speed is less important than reliability.
HGST is not revealing its spin speed - although current high-capacity Ultrastars spin at 7.200rpm – its cache size (64MB in existing Ultrastars), or the sustained data-transfer rate.
That's like a sports car manufacturer selling car without revealing the acceleration times or top speed. Or McLaren not revealing the 6:47 Nürburgring time. How can they sell it without basic specs. I'd also want to know seek time.
SSD typically has to the order of 100x faster seek and several times the sustained transfer rate of HDD. A 4 TB HDD is about $180 today, and the equivalent (4) 1 TB SDD drives are $2400, so it's a 13x cost factor. And then there's the SDD wear limitation, so you usually want to have some HDD anyway.
Sure, he may have been exaggerating, but you can't just look at the maximum continuous throughput as a measure of the relative performance between the two technologies either. Mechanical drives are still as abysmal as ever at access times, where they haven't really improved much over the years. If you're just using the drive to read huge files, this might not matter, but small files and random accesses will slow the drive's performance to a crawl. In terms of access times, SSDs can in fact be hundreds of times faster than traditional hard drives. The real-word performance results are not quite so extreme, but you're still looking at performance many times that of tradition hard drives for most purposes.
Of course, he is completely ignoring the fact that SSDs still cost many times as much per gigabyte, making them unsuitable for backup media or mass storage, which is something you could have pointed out. In situations where random read performance isn't an issue, the over 10x cost of SSDs probably isn't worth the price in most cases.
@ Alan Brown
Yes, but not me, I seen all this before as people claw on to what they know ...
Price will drop, stabilty will increase, people have whinged to me about going from, ST506 to IDE, From IDE to Sata, Floppy to CD to DVD to USB, even that SVGA was no improvement over Hercules Graphics, LCD will never have a decent image, it goes on ....
I am pretty confident these days that the old drives in my storage boxes here, will work if plugged in, as use is what usually kills them, but I am swapping things to SSD, for fun as much as anything, I was given a couple of "baby" ssd a while ago, 40/60GB ? I think, gunna put one in a Amiga1200, got to check on its esata config, and see if maybe thats works, will centralise ALL it's software ....
However the baby 512GB ssd in laptop (HP DV6 has also stopped heating "albert hall"), is tiny, 10 of them in a lump wouldn't be much bigger than desktop HD, I think Spinning the media past heads, in any form of mechanical, is numbered, jukeboxes of SSD may be a goer .....
Self destructing harddrives?
I recall a company called EDT were going to release a harddrive which could be destroyed by releasing its reservoir of acid onto the platters, but it's been removed from their website (hence the archive.org link) so its availability/existance can only be guessed at.
RunCore SSD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLxaVFBXbCk
http://www.runcore.co/en/videoShow.asp?ID=263
Toshiba SSD
http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/article/toshiba-designs-self-destruct-hard-drive
Also this at smoocon, not sure if he made a finished product
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0L-YHe2iag
Although i can see regulations would make it difficult to bring to market...!
Make sure you burn it goood:
http://gizmodo.com/388465/charred-hard-drive-from-space-shuttle-columbia-recovered-best-data-rescue-ever
Hopefully Seagate can now give us heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and blow helium filled drives out of the water and stop the SMR (Shingled magnetic recording) rubbish... i dont want 6TB its still not big enough.. 10TB + PLEASE !!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/12/seagate_hamr/
With HARM being released hopefully in the next Q, I wouldn't consider even looking at these drives until i see what size seagate throws down size wise..
Love to hear the comments about drive size...
I arrived at the Raid6 for now solution, and I write to every sector of a drive before including it in the raid.
I read somewhere that forces the reallocation of crap sectors upfront.
I don't know so much about ZFS raid, but it may become necessary to have protocols that essentially assume the disk is too large, and so data writing must have some other disaster recovery type protocol since it will be writing to untested space?
I too want the 100TB drives of the future, but will we still need RAID...?
P.
(droooooool)...
So to store one human being in digital format you would only need a stack 1/100 the way to the Moon.
Thats progress all right,
I did read somewhere that quantum memory is feasible, the "pattern buffer" could just be a stack of multilayer optical persistence media with read/write done via a full width MEMS and VCSEL array based head and spinning at about 75000 RPM.
Each disk would then store a petabyte ie 1024 TB so the actual buffer assembly wouldn't be that big at all.
See http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130327/srep01554/full/srep01554.html
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