Whoosh, there it is: Toshiba bods say 14TB helium-filled disk is coming soon Toshiba stand staff at the Huawei Connect conference 2017 in Shanghai said a 14TB helium-filled disk drive would arrive "very soon". They confirmed that meant before the end of the year. Such a capacity would leapfrog Seagate's 12TB helium-filled drive. Currently Toshiba's largest disk drive, the MN series NAS drive, holds …
Indeed do remember - 20MB hard drive in a PC-AT supporting a group of 30 people (started work in 1990 at a Big 6 accountancy firm).
The Internet was only available in black and white then - and they switched it off at the weekends (your recollections may vary............).
Which one? 110 Baud or a more 'modern' 300 Baud Cat? ;-)
As to the Internet being only B&W hog wash... a couple of friends and I went in to the EE Dept's vision lab and used the camera to make a copy of a playboy centerfold, in gasp *COLOR* and put it up on usenet. That was in the late 80's.
Mine's the coat with a pocket protector because my lead holders had sharp metal tips.
@Ian
Colour centrefold on the Internet? Wouldn't be Lena Soderberg by any chance? I still remember her being used as one of the JPEG test subjects...
After seeing the 400GB storage on a MicroSD card the size of a fingernail yesterday, we were reminiscing about the old 20mb MFM drive days that were the size of a brick.
So give it a few years and that 12TB will be on a MicroSD card and even smaller eventually.
Different technologies with different pro's and cons but it's still good fun to compare size and storage :)
Some of us started on Amstrad 8256 computers, with no hard drive. You had to load the OS and then the apps by shuffling the non-standard floppy disks around, a process that took several minutes, then used a 'data' disk to work off of.
Kids today.
Then I got a Mac Plus with no HD and '2' floppy disk drives......
I'm impressed that they go so far to reduce the weight of the product by filling it with helium, although wouldn't vacuum be even better?
I remember chatting to a bloke who used a helium-filled barrage balloon for advertising at events. Rather than faffing around with cylinders of expensive gas he just had a large trailer and pumped the gas from the balloon to a bag in the trailer and vice versa. Probably the only time when a laden trailer weighed less than an un-laden!
[Yes,I know, probably really something boring to do with air resistance and the read heads]
I hope you're joking.
Hard drives cannot run in vacuum because their operation relies on the Bernoulli Effect: a cushioning phenomenon that occurs with gases even at tiny gaps (like the infinitesimal gaps between hard drive platters and hard drive heads). Thing is, the Bernoulli Effect relies on there being a gas to work. Vacuum is the lack of gas, see?
The idea here is that helium, in contrast to say nitrogen, is a lot better gas to work with aerodynamically (it's not only atomic number 2, but as a noble gas, it exists atomically in contrast to nitrogen which normally exists as a gas in diatomic molecules--paired up--doubling its molecular weight). Catch is, helium is SO small you need special handling to keep it from getting away (as it's small enough to pass through gaps in otherwise-solid materials).
"I wonder how long mass produced HDDs will keep the helium in for?"
"At least the warranty period"
"And what will be the consequence of it leaking out?"
Increasing power consumption, slower access and eventually read failures due to the fly height of the heads being too high for reliable data.
"Catch is, helium is SO small you need special handling to keep it from getting away (as it's small enough to pass through gaps in otherwise-solid materials)."
Is the helium pressurised inside the HDD?
If not, and if the HDD enclosure material is porous enough to just let helium atoms pass then something must replace the helium because "nature abhors vacuum". Since a hydrogen atom is smaller than a helium atom, only hydrogen can replace the missing volume. Excluding the flammable nature of hydrogen, would it pose a problem for the drive?
I'm just a layman with only high school physics classes decades ago so bear with my likely flawed reasoning here!
I was thinking the same thing.
IIRC, while the density of these drives are packing in more bits per square mm, the BER (bit error rate) isn't lowered, and with more bits per platter you have a higher potential for drive failure, and RAID re-build.
I am not so sure that I would want to chance re-building a 14TB RAID array.
Some one else can be a guinea pig.
"I am not so sure that I would want to chance re-building a 14TB RAID array."
I have a 32TB one at home and multiple 300TB ones at work. Raidz3 means that they're statistically very unlikely to suffer drive failure during rebuilds (and I test that regularly as part of my operating paranoia)
"Best use one of those directional network cables..."
For the ultimate in audio purity, a pair of garden hoses full of mercury is the ultimate best speaker wire. It's even better than long crystal copper and allows you to hear every nuance of the performance including that mosquito farting beside the timpanis during the intermezzo.
Now when you consider that you're future proofing it.
All of the stuff is going to be hi-res.
Today 4K tomorrow (a couple of years) 8K .
The only problem is that you can now make out the ass acne and makeup can't hide all of the blemishes.
But at 8K, how much storage is required for a full length flick?
The only problem is that you can now make out the ass acne and makeup can't hide all of the blemishes.
No doubt there will be a custom GPU to deal with stuff like that, already today the Asians have "beautifying" algorithms built into their cameras and smartphones.
What will really eat storage is bio-printing combined with porn ...
Shingled drives aren't as big an issue if they're intended for WIRE usage (Write Infrequently, Read Extensively). Then the wear-and-tear in the write phase is minimized. HAMR still isn't ready yet, and you have to wonder about the longevity of that heating element.
Two manufacturers announced 12TB He drives about New Year, saying they would be available mid-2017. Then 3-4 months ago they announced they were now available. Except they aren't. You can't buy them anywhere, that I can find.
A couple of suppliers have had them listed for a couple of months, but with no stock and no sign of when they will receive any stock. For the last month or so I have been checking major retailers and even comparison sites almost daily but no one has any available (even though the couple of sites that list them keep changing their prices slightly every day).
So, I don't believe these 14TB drives will be available by the end of the year.
I spent a thousand dollars $US on a Thinkertoy floppy drive back about '78. It was the size of a small toolbox and used a single sided floppy that held 256k. And I loved it. Before that the only storage was cassette tape which was barfo slow.
I tried to calculate how many floppies equals 14tb but the calculator overflowed.
Thinking back, I have no idea where my young self came up with a grand for the purchase. About four thousand today and probably a good part of a years salary then. I must have held up a liquor store while blind drunk.
The first cry you hear with the announcement of an even larger capacity HDD is that it will be impossible to use them in a RAID array due to an almost infinite amount of time needed for a RAID rebuild. Get a clue. These helium-filled HDDs are destined to be deployed in object-based storage clusters where single or multiple drive failures have no effect on the operational status of the cluster. Failed of disabled HDDs in object-based storage clusters are just pulled and replaced, hopefully under warranty.
But doesn't that still entail some kind of rebuilding process whereby lost redundancy is restored, which still takes time and is limited by the throughput of the drive? Meaning the cluster is still vulnerable to another failure during the rebuild such that objects get lost past their redundancy limit?
Well, not rebuild in the RAID controller sense. In an object storage cluster data is protected using replication (copies) of data objects or erasure coding (data fragments + parity fragment) of data objects to achieve the desired level of data durability. In most object storage clusters replication and erasure coding policies can be specified at the "bucket" level. Replication typically defaults to three replicas with one replica stored on three different nodes in the cluster. Erasure coding schemes can vary considerably in their combination of data fragments and parity fragments, but the fragments themselves are dispersed to a number of nodes in the cluster so that no node has more than a single fragment (data or parity). HDD failure in a given node means the replicas and parity fragments stored on the failed HDD will be re-created by the object-based storage software on other HDDs in the cluster. At no time will the replicated or erasure coded data become inaccessible while this happens.
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