Toshiba, you can't have 14TB served on a platter. It'll take eight, at least Toshiba lags behind WDC and Seagate in high-capacity 3.5-inch drives, having just reached 10TB. The other two are waving from 12TB and WDC has recently hit 14TB. How can Tosh catch up? Toshiba has achieved 1TB/platter areal density with its MQ04 2.5-inch disk drive. That would imply 10TB+ 3.5-inch disk drives. Unlike Seagate …
Given the pressure differential (tiny) and the lack of thin permeable surfaces to percolate through, the short answer is that the drives may leak their helium but not on a meaningful timescale (ie, not within 5 years, possibly not within 10). It _will_ percolate through eventually, but eventually is a long time.
The interesting thing I found playing with He-Ne lasers (mostly running at a soft vacuum) is that what kills them isn't so much the helium leaking out, as much as nitrogen leaking IN (characterised by a violet discharge)
If there is any avenue for helium to leak then some will be expelled as the inside of the disk gets hot. It will then float away in the denser air.
When the disk cools again the same avenue could be too small for air to be sucked back in. The pressure inside the disk will be lower - but will still be uncontaminated helium.
That process probably occurs at some factory initial burning in stage - so wouldn't be repeated in a user environment unless the disk gets hotter.
Whether it would eventually keep leaking due to Brownian motion - and keep reducing the internal pressure - is one for the physicists.
If the escape avenue also allows air to enter then the helium inside will be contaminated over time - even if only by Brownian motion.
@ razorfishsl
The problem with your example is that the air can get into the glass to replace the helium. In the drive, air can't get in to replace the helium so any losses would create negative pressure inside - which would serve to keep the remaining helium in place.
It's the same concept as the trick you can do with a bottle of water - fill it up, put some small holes in (with the cap on) and the water will stay in the bottle.. remove the cap and the water will spurt out.
"I wonder if it would be worth having double thickness drives. "
Nope. The bearings can't hold the stack rigidly enough
As for larger platters - remember Quantum Bigfoots. The platters are harder to make and any uneveness is exacerbated. It's been tried but is virtually impossible to keep reliable above about 3600rpm.
All these use cases are short term anyway. 16TB SSDs are already here (I have a couple installed) and prices keep coming down, whilst HDD prices and warranties are _STILL_ higher/lower respectively across the board than they were before the 2011 Thai Floods.
The extra money for SSD is made up for by greater reliability, longer life(*), lower access latencies and lower power consumption, so it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the two based on price alone.My feeling is that the break point for SSD adoption is about 3 times the HDD price and that's already been passed at sizes below 1TB (with SSDs now ruling the roost)
(*) When was the last time you saw a HDD with a ten year warranty?
I was talking about height rather than width - the platters could be the same size, just more of them.
And HDD's have their uses. My media library for instance - it doesn't need to be fast or last forever. My pretty much only concern when adding disks to it is GB per £.
I have no interest in spending thousands on a 16TB SSD when I could have the same capacity from HDD's for about £400.
I'd still much rather have an affordable 2Tb SSD.
As in MUCH rather.
That's the second article today on hard drives (Seagate, Toshiba) and I actually question why anyone is still pumping money into them, except to get the "last run" of hard disks out the door.
I do hope that these companies aren't spending all their time and money faffing about with helium.
I'm the other way around. There are plenty of packrats around who want to be sure what they have is still there in the event of a company going down or no Internet (remember, no Internet = no Cloud). Tape storage is out of reach for the consumer, so a way to economically store a lot of data (speed is not an issue, and pairing up helps guard against a catastrophic failure) is a boon in my book.
GIven the number of HDD failures I get to see where someone's tried to use them as archival storage, I don't trust 'em. If you want long term archival backup then use tape or ensure you regularly migrate your media - but bear in mind that HDDs will give you an undetected ECC error (corrupted sector read) about once every 45TB read, vs every 4500TB for tapes.
I'd suggest M-disk, but even the BD-R versions aren't really large enough.
Like I said, tape is out of reach in the consumer end. Has been since the QIC days.
Silent corruption I can deal with via error codes if necessary.
Like you said, BDs are too small for archival needs in the TB range.
And drive rotation is part of any archival plan. As long as it can be held to about one every 4-5 years, it's still within reason.
And large-capacity SSDs are still too expensive. They need to drop A LOT before they can fall into consumer range.
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