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Western Digital Announces Ultrastar He12 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs
- mattbillenstein 10y agoHDD is the new tape.
- epistasis 10y agoNearly. It has the benefit of being random access, but for backup purposes it has the disadvantage of 1) being online (usually), 2) high per-drive overhead (even with huge SAS JBODs chained together), 3) shorter lifespan. Of course nobody wants to deal with the difficulties of tape, and tapes have not kept up with the density of drives, either.
- 24gttghh 10y agoLTO-7 is 6TB/tape, at ~$115/tape (on sale[0]). The cheapest 6TB HDD on newegg is a refurbished WD Red for $198[1]. [0]https://www.tapeandmedia.com/hp-lto-7-tape-ultrium-tapes-c7977a.asp https://www.tapeandmedia.com/hp-lto-7-tape-ultrium-tapes-c79... [1]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAY949U3367 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAY949U33...
- derekp7 10y agoBut the cost of the drives is extravagant. Not anywhere near the price point for individual use. And for enterprise use, a tape drive doesn't make sense unless it is part of a tape changer. Fortunately, the drives are so expensive that the cost of the changer is marginal in comparison.
- dom0 10y agoEven then, you can get a used (still good, for a couple years at least) LTO-5 drive for around 200-250 EUR. The tapes cost about 20-25 EUR each and are good for 1.5 TB -- with a small tape library you'd break even over hard drives beyond maybe ~20 TB. Remember, as disks get better, so will tape - the technology isn't the same, but similar enough that advances in one will certainly cause similar advances in the other.
- chrisper 10y agoDon't HDDs also have more bitrot than tape?
- wazoox 10y agoI've built an archival application that can turn off individual drives at will and full JBODs too. That makes the disk "off line". Useful for people who don't want to have any tapes. The application works with tapes too anyway :)
- epistasis 10y agoThat's a really cool system, and absolutely great for power consumption. For backup purposes, if the drive can be turned on without a physical unlock, IMHO it's not truly offline, as an attacker could still cause data loss without physical infiltration.
- bluedino 10y agoWe're going to dead end soon with SSD's right? Once we get to a certain density. Then what? You can't get any 'better' than that, like you did going from paper tape to magnetic tape to disks to flash
- kibwen 10y agoHere's Intel's bet on the next generation of storage tech beyond Flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint
- the8472 10y agomy understanding is that mram cells can scale down to smaller process sizes than flash cells.
- rogerdpack 10y agoIt appears the (SSD) answer is "3D stacking" and I have no idea where that might end...
- chx 10y agoTape is Dead Disk is Tape Flash is Disk RAM Locality is King Jim Gray, Ten years ago
- brianwawok 10y agoI bet he didn't predict the MacBook pro ram Joke aye? Same ram for 5 years?
- chx 10y agoI thought there's nothing worse than Apple fanbois trapped in the reality distortion field. There is: scorned Apple fanbois trapped in the reality distortion field.
- sergiotapia 10y agoI'm guessing these aren't really consumer drives. :( Might as well ask here. My 2TB Plex hard drive is getting full. What's the best solution if I want say 10TB to store my media for Plex but very hands off? I don't want to weld any contraption just plug something in and have it be visible by Windows 10.
- chrisper 10y agoYou will need some kind of NAS, I suppose, or you can use something like stablebit drivepool.
- tachion 10y agoGet yourself Avoton motherboard, buy as many WD Green/Red drives that have best cost/space ratio as your chosen enclosure and budget can handle, install FreeNAS, enjoy ;)
- clinta 10y agoIf you're going to put WD Greens in a FreeNAS, run wdidle to increase or disable the idle spin down timer in the drive first.
- s4vi0r 10y agoHow commonly do WD Greens actually fail? I'm either strangely lucky, or the whole unreliable WD Greens thing is way overblown because I've been using three 1TB ones without incident for 5 years now..
- tachion 10y agoIt's actually hard to say. You might be very lucky, someone else might be very unlucky. Generally, RAID was 'invented' to operate on cheap, commodity hardware, where the failure rate might be high. When it comes to data, most reliable one you can find (mostly due to its probe size and lack of competitive reports of similar size) are Backblaze's drives reliability reports.
- KaiserPro 10y agoeach standard server rack can store 2400 TB of data if fully populated with 10 TB 240 disks in a rack?? http://www.advancedhpc.com/data_storage/raid_storage/dell/PV_md3260.html http://www.advancedhpc.com/data_storage/raid_storage/dell/PV... 60 disks per 4u Thats 600 in a 42u rack
- dom0 10y agoSuperMicro has a 90 disk top-loading 4U storage server. It's deeper, of course. However, they probably thought about standard 2U servers with no second disk row, so 12 disks per 2U = 252 disks / rack.
- KaiserPro 10y agoAh, yeah, forgot about those. so many disks. edit: https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/946/SC946ED-R2KJBOD https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/946/SC946ED-R... if you want to look and drool.
- dom0 10y agoI think the Sun Thumper kinda invented the concept - many successful copies since :)
- cjg_ 10y agoAWS was doing 1100 disk in their previous generation storage 42u rack (used 8TB disks for 8.8PB). Source: James Hamiltons talk at reinvent 2016 (http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/ReInvent2016_James%20Hamilton.pdf http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/ReInvent2016_James%20... p25)
- Jerry2 10y agoWhy helium? I know it's inert but there are many other noble gases. Why not some other gas? Also, why not create a vacuum to minimize friction?
- dom0 10y agoVacuum = requires special lubricants or no lubricants at all, since they would dissipate due to the lowered vapour pressure. Lubricant everywhere would likely be problematic. It's also harder to seal in, and would likely require a much more rigid construction to avoid warping of the drive (these are precision devices after all). Lastly, the hovering of the R/W heads over the platters requires an atmosphere - they are lifted by the air/gas accelerated by the platters (this is a well defined lift force and self-regulates the head height relative to the platter).
- SamReidHughes 10y agoThe drive heads float on air, which is why vacuum doesn't work, and the benefit of helium is that it's light -- not that it's inert.
- jlubawy 10y ago"The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, which reduces drag force acting on the spinning disk stack and lowers fluid flow forces affecting the disks and the heads, allowing for platters to be thinner and a larger number to be packed more densely." [0] [0] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10106/western-digital-introduces-its-consumer-helium-drives http://www.anandtech.com/show/10106/western-digital-introduc...
- ridgeguy 10y agoIn addition to its lower drag, it has higher thermal conductivity than air. Reduces certain heat effects.
- ctingom 10y agoI bought a Synology NAS this year: Highlights include the Amazon Cloud Drive backup, Plex Server, and it can hold four 4TB drives. No problems so far.
- mike503 10y agoJust wish someone would come out with a chassis like Synology DS2416's and such. I've been using my actual Synology for so many years because I keep holding out the perfect chassis comes out.
- bluedino 10y agoAre these what people theorized Dropbox was using to get the densities they claimed in the BackBlaze pod threads?
- wmf 10y agoThere was talk about Dropbox using 14TB drives. It's possible that these drives have actually existed for over a year and HGST is only now deciding to announce them to the public, but there's really no evidence one way or the other. The cloud space is full of rumors about awesome yet secret equipment but they don't really pass Occam's Razor since if it's so awesome why keep it secret?
- tw04 10y ago>since if it's so awesome why keep it secret? Because if Facebook or Google says "I'll take every drive you can make for the next year", you've got guaranteed minimum revenues for the next 12 months. If you tell them they can only have half, and you release the other half to the retail market, they may or may not sell in the quantities you're hoping for. And you will likely loose the contract for goog/fb.
- skuhn 10y agoCertainly anything is possible if you're a large enough (or strategic enough) customer, but I tend to doubt that Dropbox had a year or two head start on these models. For one thing, I wouldn't build out my entire storage system with one model from one vendor that hasn't been field proven yet. With 4T drives, you can easily achieve raw storage of 2.9PB in a rack. The previous top of the line (10T drives) yield 7.4PB in a rack. 14T pushes that up to 10.4PB. Higher densities are possible as well. The most I'm aware of is 90x 3.5" in 4U; available from Supermicro, Dell and others. The depth of the chassis can be problematic, and the way Supermicro designed it isn't super great in my opinion. Sacrificing hot swap capability could potentially yield higher density (~100-ish drives), which I think is a reasonable tradeoff if you're deploying a ton of these hosts and you can let dead drives hang out for a while. I'm not aware of anyone who makes a chassis like that that can be bought off the shelf though. At these drive sizes though, I would be leery of having that much storage attached to a single host from a fault domain perspective. I think the next step is either a highly dense 2U chassis (HP has something like this, but only 28 bays) or a two server 4U chassis (Dell has something like this).
- tdb7893 10y agoI've yet to find something more impressive to me than the fact that a hard drive can accurately find a single bit out of trillions on a spinning disk.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tristanb 10y agoHelium is really hard to contain, (just ask SpaceX!) Do these leak and degrade, or do they have some magical way to keep the gas in?
- planteen 10y agoHere's a whitepaper from Seagate with some details: http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd-10tb/_shared/docs/helium-drive-launch-tp686-1-1602us.pdf http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/ent... Sounds like they design them for a 5 year life.
- greglindahl 10y agoThese drives contain Helium at 5500 atmospheres while submerged in cryogenic LOX or RP1? Wow.
- rasz_pl 10y agoyes and yes, perfect planned obsolescence