Looks good, but I'll wait for helium filled SSD.
Helium... No. Do you think this is some kind of game? Toshiba intros 8TB desktop drive
Toshiba has upgraded its X300 gaming/workstation desktop drive from 6TB to 8TB capacity, continuing to sidestep any moves to helium-filling tech. This is a 3.5-inch drive spinning at 7,200rpm, with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and 128MB cache. The prior generation came with 4, 5 and 6TB capacity points. The latest X300 only has an …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 15:33 GMT anthonyhegedus
Unless you need the storage for photos, videos or games, using SSDs makes computers run they way they're meant to. I think it's no longer acceptable to have a new computer with any sort of mechanical spinning disk. The performance hit is ridiculous. A plain old Dual Core laptop (not even a core i3) will run perfectly well with an SSD. Far better than a Core i5 or i7 even with a spinning disk in many real-world use-cases (like opening and closing email clients, word processors, web browsers etc.).
What annoys me is that so many laptops that have SSDs are either tiny 128GB affairs, or at the top of the price spectrum and have 256GB SSDs. Hardly any have drives bigger than that. The situation is improving, but with almost all of the "budget" laptops having spinning disks, it makes them seem slow and clunky.
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Wednesday 1st June 2016 02:31 GMT Charles 9
Re: Charles 9
That THUNK is the sound of the helium-filled SSD hitting someone in the head because it performs no better than the one filled with air given SSDs, by definition, have no mechanical parts to take advantage of the aerodynamics. They'd use other substances (like solids and liquids) if they were more interested in thermal transfer. And next time, if you're going to make a joke, use the Joke Alert.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 10:44 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Longevity
Helium is significantly smaller than air. (It's smaller and monatomic.) Being Helium-tight is therefore more of an engineering challenge than being air-tight. I don't know whether it is *hard*, but it is certainly harder and (as the OP notes) the drive depends on it not happening.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 10:59 GMT Mage
Re: Longevity
CRTs gradually acquire helium, degrading performance. However if the pressure is slightly lower than air pressure, then as air can't get in, why would the helium leave?
Still I'd maybe rather have one of these than a helium filled drive and certainly more than a shingled one.
Note an HDD won't work without gas in it, vacuum won't work, as the heads actually "fly". Bernoulli principle or something?
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 11:05 GMT Hawkuletz
Re: Longevity
However, the challenge is not to keep Helium in as it is to keep air out. After all, Helium would only escape if there some pressure differential between the inside of the drive and the atmosphere. If air can't get in (airtight seal) surely the drive will not experience a vacuum caused by escaped helium.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 12:56 GMT Mike Shepherd
Re: Longevity
"Helium would only escape if there some pressure differential between the inside of the drive and the atmosphere...".
Does diffusion depend on a pressure difference? Net diffusion of a given gas would depend on the difference in its *own* partial pressure (across the membrane), but would take place independently of any other gas present. (The whole notion of a gas is that its particles don't interact much with others).
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 12:49 GMT Mike Shepherd
Re: Longevity
"Helium...smaller and monatomic...therefore..."
Nice theory, but I recall a TV school science programme where children actually did the experiment (diffusion time from a balloon) and found that carbon dioxide escapes much faster than hydrogen (perhaps because it could dissolve in the rubber of the balloon?) Real life is rarely as simple as GCSE physics.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 14:37 GMT Charles 9
Re: Longevity
"Nice theory, but I recall a TV school science programme where children actually did the experiment (diffusion time from a balloon) and found that carbon dioxide escapes much faster than hydrogen (perhaps because it could dissolve in the rubber of the balloon?)"
I think it was CO2 vs. ordinary air, that one. I don't think they've compared hydrogen OR helium (the two lightest gases in existence, weights of 2 and 4 respectively, and practically nothing in the way of shape to interfere with diffusion--H2 is a barbell and He is monoatomic).
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 13:03 GMT Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese
Re: Longevity
I don't recall that we ever had to change the helium bottle.
Really? You have better self-discipline than me then. If we had kit like that here, we'd constantly be goofing around breathing the helium to do the funny voice thing....probably be ordering a new gas bottle every couple of weeks or so.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 11:08 GMT Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Re: Longevity
That's right, helium drives need another level of manufacturing quality.
Previous drives have had plenty of sealing failures. In best cases it increases media error rates slightly, in worst cases seals can disintegrate so badly that they'll become a source of serious contamination.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 12:04 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Longevity
"Previous drives have had plenty of sealing failures."
Standard drives are not sealed. Being sealed would be a Very Bad Thing as amongst other things they wouldn't be able to be airfreighted or used in passenger aircraft at altitude. On the other hand the breathers on standard drives have pretty good filters to keep "stuff" out and there are also filters inside the case to catch and trap anything thrown off the platters.
Helium-filled drives have to be rigid enough to handle the extra case stresses causes by external variations in atmospheric pressure (weather and altitude). They also need to have good enough seals to handle this variation, which means that they're pretty good at keeping helium IN and everything else OUT. That said I'm not sure I'd want to fire one up whilst flying at 30,000 feet.
FWIW you could probably fill 20-30 HDDs with the helium in one party balloon.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 12:49 GMT Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Re: Longevity
"Standard drives are not sealed."
They are not sealed against atmospheric pressure. But there are seals against dust. By design, air should get in only through the filter attached to the breather hole. What I was talking about: if the dust seal starts to deteriorate, foreign particles may enter through the seal and end up on the platter. Or the seal itself decomposes into flying debris.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 11:13 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: Longevity
Blackblaze Q1 2016 data shows HGSTs Helium drives have a lower than average failure rate. Data for WD is in there, but I do not recognise which models are Helium. Read and think before drawing conclusions: very new models often get bad numbers when the defective ones fail early. Very old models get bad numbers because they have been in service for over five years. Seagate used to have poor reliability, but low price and clear warnings of imminent failure in the SMART data made them cost effective anyway.
WD spent lots of time working out how to keep helium in a box, and IIRC were first to market with a Helium filled drive. Their competitors did not rush competing products to market because keeping helium in a box for years is difficult. Toshiba's small market share will make statistically significant data very rare.
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 12:11 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Longevity
"Blackblaze Q1 2016 data shows HGSTs Helium drives have a lower than average failure rate"
Every time I've looked at BackBlaze's stats, HGST drives have a lower than average failure rate (helium filled or not) and my own datacentre experience backs that up. The only HGST drive I've ever seen fail inside its warrantied lifespan came in packaging that showed clear signs of extremely rough handling.
WD, not so much and Seagate's "enterprise" drives have generally been more unreliable than their consumer counterparts (with the exception of the consumer barracuda DM series - of which every single drive failed _at least_ once during its warranty period. None have ever lasted more than 7000 hours and some less than half that)
The chinese ministry of commerce and competition finally OKed HGST being folded into WD - hence WD now selling helium drives, but they also OKed Toshiba being folded into Seagate, so these X300 might be Toshiba or they might be Toshiba-branded Seagate. Do you feel lucky, punk?
(This ties into today's other story about spinny disk sales collapsing. They'll collapse faster now the mergers are underway)
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Tuesday 31st May 2016 19:48 GMT I Like Heckling
Still waiting for 6TB prices to fall
I've been holding of waiting for prices to fall on 6TB drives... so the more 8TB drives that hit the consumer market the better.
Why would I need that much space... Because I run a mediaserver that currently has 14TB (1x 4TB, 2x3TB and 2x 2TB plus 250GB SSD) and is running out of room. Even redoing bluray/dvd stuff into HEVC is only a very short term solution and running 6 drives (inc SSD for OS) means that I can't actually use the bluray drive on the mediaserver (so use the main desktop instead for ripping).
I need to replace the last 2TB drives with something substantial so I can free up that bluray drive again... can't add a PCI-E SATA card as all of the slots are in use already and I'm not replacing the motherboard anytime soon to give me more SATA sockets.
My media is expanding quicker than my storage and a 4TB drive isn't big enough any more.
The most I've ever paid for a hard drive is around £95... but ever since the flood a few years back that hit productions. Prices have remained inflated long after production is back at full tilt.
Ideally I'd love to pick up a bulk loads of 8TB drives but if I had that kind of money I'd rebuild the mediaserver add a couple of extra 5TB drives and use the change to upgrade my main gaming rig instead.