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Seagate Announces 12 TB HDD: 2nd-Gen Helium-Filled HDD
- killjoywashere 10y agoI know a few folks who use these, their applications usually involve a lot of them, high in the atmosphere (in flight or remote observatories on mountaintops) where downlink is prohibitive. Any other realistic use cases? Undersea maybe? But space isn't at quite such a premium there.
- wmf 10y agoThey're mostly used for cheap cloud storage like S3/Dropbox/Backblaze/etc.
- chx 10y agoThe top dogs are rarely the cheapest gigabyte/dollar wise. If you look at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Q4-2016-Drive-Failure-Rates.jpg https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Q4... you will see their bread-and-butter was still 4TB in 2016 with 8TB slowly introducing.
- brianwawok 10y agoBuilt my NAS 8 years ago with 500gb drives. Upgraded 5 years ago to 2 TB. Not even half full yet :(
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThese are tape drives with a very fast rewind and seek behavior.
- rincebrain 10y agoIn the sense that they're devices with higher performance for sequential than random IO but relatively slow to rewrite the entire device relative to capacity, or specifically the use cases that parent is describing?
- ChuckMcM 10y agoBasically, yes. Back in the stone age disks were "fast" in random access but they couldn't hold as much as tape could. So to get the storage you had a mix of disk and tape. That started as you had a command you would send to the operator (another historical concept) which was the person who was responsible for 'operating' the computer. That would print a message on a hard copy terminal that would say "Load Tape XYZ on Drive 2" or something similar, the Operator would go to the shelf of tapes, pull out the one that was labeled XYZ and put it on drive 2, "mount it" (which would, on vacuum readers, suck in and tension the tape and read the first block (the label)) and make it available to the operator who could verify it was XYZ and then send pack (again on the console) "tape loaded." Then your batch program would start and you'd get the classic video of a computer with the tape being read in bits and bursts and often another tape being written in bits and bursts. Computers got bigger (able to process more data) and tape libraries got bigger, one of Sun's big customers was Fingerhut (mail order catalog) in Minnesota and they had a room where there were lots of 'tape operators' and when a customer was on the phone and the operator said "let me bring up your account" it lit a sign in the tape room with the needed tape, someone would jump up and grab it and put it on the nearest tape drive and 'tag' (there was a clock showing time from request to mount) and the tape would identify itself and send the customer record to a disk so that they were "online" and the operator's screen would light up with all the customer details. IBM and StorageTek made robotic libraries that did the same thing, but without the human in the loop. Then in the early 2000's NetApp and other storage vendors started offering ATA disk drives (dense, cheap) as storage offerings and slowly, eventually the tape libraries were crushed because this dense storage was more cost effective. Primary disk storage has now gone over to solid state disks. They have even better random access and generally and do reads at the limits of the interface they are attached to. But there is still a market for dense, cheap, read mostly data stores. That which used to be tapes, then tape libraries, and now spinning rust in a bath of helium. A typical SATA drive can really only do about 110 "IOPS" per second, in a large part because the mechanics of moving things around is inviolate. So the use for dense data stores behind a small i/o pipe is read mostly archival and reference data. Oil & Gas sonar dumps, credit card sales transactions, backups of data which is 'live' elsewhere, etc. The role that Tape used to play but no longer does very well.
- drivethrowinguy 10y agoYou're probably confusing these with SMR drives. These here are standard PMR, so they are just like any other hard drive regarding random I/O.
- Amezarak 10y agoIf I built my NAS today instead of three years ago, I'd be using them. You really can't have too much local storage. Price is the only prohibitive factor, though rebuild times are starting to be too. Another factor to consider is that uplink, if you wanted to store stuff in the cloud, is almost always terribly slow and often capped, plus the cost of storing multiple TBs on any given provider.
- blackflame7000 10y agoRebuild times pretty much forced me out of Raid5 and into a Raid10 after I encountered a secondary drive failure during rebuild. Luckily it was my raid controller pre-flagging questionable sectors that weren't actually reallocated so I was able to recover but now I always like to keep 2 independent backups. I use SFP-10gb links between computers to move files and even that is painfully slow transferring terabytes. You're right, The cloud is in many ways less practical until the bandwidth is available to access it all.
- bigiain 10y agoYep - it's been a long time since raw storage costs were so high I couldn't justify and afford to use raid 0 [Edit: Raid 1 not 0 - as DuskStar corrected me...) for everything that matters. Whenever I buy drives these days, I buy three of them at a time (if possible, the same size drives from at least two different vendors or batches from the same vendor).
- walrus01 10y ago
- deftnerd 10y agoDelimiter has $10/mo "bring your own drive" storage plans. Just buy this drive and ship it to them and share it with a VPS or cheap server there and you can store a lot of media for a cloud Plex server
- yourapostasy 10y agoWhen I looked [1], it reads as if they have an 8 TB cap on this service. That is, you can ship them any drive, up to 8 TB, to plug in and run at $10 per month. It sounds like their pricing is predicated on some kind of assumed Watt-hours per TB. It would be interesting if someone offered a similar plan, but priced on energy consumed instead, giving incentive for managed storage arrays that power down drives that idle (for some algorithmically-derived definition of "idle", trading off against projected lifespan of the device due to increased power cycling), and other energy-saving practices. Slices up the granularity of cloud hosting even finer. [1] https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/ https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- X-Istence 10y agoThese are fantastic for long-term storage of something that may need to be retrieved at a moments notice, but is rarely accessed. One example from a previous job, these in a Ceph cluster as an origin for a CDN delivering video. We transcode the video to various bit rates and chunk em, then clients request them through CDN, there is not a lot of writing, with some reads when the asset is new, but once it is cached it just basically sits and is idle. Larger capacity meant we could store more data in a single rack, our limitation for the origin wasn't CPU or bandwidth throughput, it was literally our storage that forced us to keep expanding. The deployment I did was using 8TB drives. We used HGST with their Helium because of the lesser power draw, allowing us to install more servers in a rack without going over our maximum power draw and heat density for cooling.
- loeg 10y agoAnywhere space is at a premium. PB/rack matters some places.
- walrus01 10y agoParticularly anywhere that $$$/rack per mo and $ per kWh matters. Such as a medium sized CDN or backup service (Backblaze, etc) that wants to cram as many 3.5" drives into a 4U chassis as possible. If one is colocating multiple racks of 4U sized servers as close as possible to a major IX point, the rack space and power costs go up considerably.
- cobookman 10y agoSeagate also has a 60TB SSD: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb...
- Retric 10y agoNope, they can demo it but nobody is sticking 25,000$ worth of SSD off of the tiny bandwidth you get from a single drive. So, they are not selling it night now.
- cowardlydragon 10y agoWhat can they fit in a 5.25" enclosure? I always wished a 5.25 mass storage HDD would come back on the market. How much would those hold relative to this? Hm, I'm guessing about 2.5x more data per platter, about 50% more platters... 45GB?
- simcop2387 10y agoSame here. I suspect we won't see spinning Rust in that form factor because tooling costs would just eat it, but flash can scale with volume almost perfectly since it's just chips on a PCB. It's need some kind of hi bandwidth interface though, not sure what speed SAS is at, or if it's competitive to pcie nvme stuff. I haven't had to look at that stuff in a while
- Retric 10y agoBandwidth is already starting to be an issue with drives this size, at 2.5x the data simply reading or writing everything would take over a month.
- Dylan16807 10y agoYou can read or write these entire drives in under a day. It wouldn't take a month.
- 10y ago
- cowardlydragon 10y agoEIGHT platters? More platters more failures and heat, isn't that right? Or does He change the equation on that?
- nradov 10y agoHelium is an excellent thermal conductor so it should move the heat around pretty well.
- kazinator 10y agoInteresting: found this table: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429.html http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429... Big difference between different gases. But, check this out. Helium also has a high heat capacity. Table on same website: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-gases-d_159.html http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-gas... Six times the conductivity of nitrogen (0.142 to 0.024) and five times the heat capacity: 5.19 to 1.04. Big conductivity and capacity should translate to "convective cooling monster gas". :)
- astrodust 10y agoWhy would the platters be generating heat? By definition there's no physical concact with the heads, ergo minimal friction. I thought the primary reason for using a monatomic gas was it would allow the heads to fly closer to the metal.
- bigiain 10y agoOf course, Im gonna need three, because backing one of these up to the cloud from my home adsl would take (tap tap tap, calculate) 3.5 _years!_ (sorry cperciva, not gonna tarsnap this even at picodollars per gigabyte!) (fortunately, it'd only take 3-4 months to bittorrent down all those, ummm, linux ISOs...)
- comboy 10y ago> sorry cperciva, not gonna tarsnap this even at picodollars per gigabyte! Oh, I would, but I guess you meant per byte. At current rates it's $3K monthly to keep a backup of this HDD on tarsnap and that's not including bandwidth. That's six 10TB drives. I don't mean to discourage from tarsnap though. Cloud storage is unfortunately still pretty expensive, and most people are probably only truly paranoid about much less than 1GB of their data.
- paulddraper 10y agoTrue. Linux images can easily be redownloaded.
- bigiain 10y agoEven if he were paying me to use tarsnap I wouldn't use it for backing up 12TB. I'd consider a backup solution that takes 3+years to make a full backup (or 4 months for a restore) to be of negative value to me... (I wonder how many months I'd get away with uploading 300GB/month before my "unlimited" ADSL plan hit me with it's "acceptable use" disclaimers? Given that I'd be using 100% of my upload bandwidth to take this 3 year backup, I suspect the cost of 2 identical drives to make local backups would probably be cheaper than the network costs of sending it to tarsnap!)
- kristofferR 10y agoWhy don't just use Arq (encrypted cloud backups for Win+MacOS, $49) and Amazon Cloud Storage (unlimited storage for $59 a year)? I've got terabytes backed up, no issues at all.
- 10y ago
- boxcardavin 10y agoAny sense of how much helium will permeate through the grain structure of the drive enclosure during its lifetime?
- JohnJamesRambo 10y agoDoes helium go through metal?
- astrodust 10y agoNo seal is ever perfect, that's the concern. Plus helium, being monatomic, is able to jam into tinier holes than things like oxygen, nitrogen, or water vapour.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoI've asked people who used the first gen He drives because it's an obvious worry, and the consensus seems to be that they're at least as reliable as conventional drives. MTBF doesn't seem unusually bad, and can even be better than some trad designs.
- Nition 10y agoThis is different than the typical failure scenario though, isn't it? You might have a few drives with bad seals that fail early. But say the majority are sealed properly, but the helium still leaks out at x small rate over time, you might have almost all the drives suddenly fail at around the same time after say 6 years or whatever. I don't think you can really know if they're truly reliable in that sense until you can take one that's been sitting one in a drawer for 10 years and plug it in.
- astrodust 10y agoA company like Backblaze is bound to find out before the consumers do but I have a feeling it'll be fine. Keeping gas inside of something isn't much harder than keeping it sealed enough that dust stays out. A high-altitude environment might put more pressure on the seals than other places, that could shorten the life-span, but other than that it shouldn't be a huge deal. Most drives have a commercial life-span of no more than 4-6 years anyway. After that you're on borrowed time.
- excalibur 10y agoGood thing there isn't a global shortage of extractable helium.
- jessriedel 10y agoThere isn't. There is a robust market in Helium, and its price represents the cost of bothering to recover the large quantities that are produced (and generally vented) as a by product of oil extraction. We could have much more helium if we wanted to pay for it, but it's not worth it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/18/were-really-not-about-to-run-out-of-helium-no-please-stop-it-were-not/#6f6f3ade13b6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/18/were-rea... https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/ https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-in... > In 2014, the US Department of Interior estimated that there are 1,169 billion cubic feet of helium reserves left on Earth. That’s enough for about 117 more years.
- dajohnson89 10y agoI would consider 117 years a pretty significant shortage.
- killjoywashere 10y agoProven oil reserves have been at more or less 30 years for the last 60 years. So, take the 117 with a grain of salt. Especially since a significant amount of that helium is sourced from oil.
- jessriedel 10y agoThose are the reserves we currently know about, extractable with current technology and at current prices.
- dajohnson89 10y agoYou do realize that it's rational to make conclusions based on available evidence, right?
- myrandomcomment 10y agoHum. I am thinking about ordering a new FreeNAS Mini (the 8 bay one). I was going to get the 6TB drives.... So right now I have 3 copies of everything. 1. Masters are on 4 bay FreeNAS mini (ZFS baby!) 2. Rsync to Thunderbolt drive on desktop (well laptop but...TB monitor with drive attached). 3. Everything goes up to Backblaze auto-magicly.
- korzun 10y agoYou should call the 10 o'clock news so they can cover this.
- matthew-wegner 10y agoI guess you might be buying something for your desk/living space if you're thinking of something that small. But if you aren't (or for others who might be reading this), that's a crazy price. In case noise and idle power consumption aren't as big of an issue: You can get a 12-bay Supermicro with two six-core CPUs + 48GB and 12 HDD bays for <$400 shipped: http://www.ebay.com/itm/2U-Supermicro-12-Bay-826TQ-R800-Server-X8DTN-2x-Xeon-E5645-Six-Core-48GB-Rail-/132098335210 http://www.ebay.com/itm/2U-Supermicro-12-Bay-826TQ-R800-Serv... Or the very popular SA120 DAS for <$300 to hang 12 bays off another machine (Dell R210II is quiet and cheap): http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-SA120-DIRECT-ATTACHED-STORAGE-1-I-O-MODULE-12-X-D-/162356290095 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-SA120-... (Random eBay links I found just now, have no affiliation with either of them)
- myrandomcomment 10y agoWell it is for my office / man cave. I have a 19" telco rack in the corner that has as switch, the mini and a box running proxmox running VMs (minecraft server, work testing VMs, etc.). My startup buys from IxSystems for all or our stuff so I hope to get a good discount. My current 4 bay I have had for 4 years and it just works. Also the support from IxSystems has been great. I have spent so much of my life build data centers and networks, et.al. that just paying for something that works has a great deal of appeal. In 1998-2001 the rack has a ton of systems, switches and routers, now I guess I would just trade $ to spend time with the family. If I am going to build anything it will be a new Ryzen gaming setup.
- akandiah 10y agoWhat are the downsides of Helium when it comes to data recovery? If it comes down to the click-of-death, surely a traditional clean-room set-up won't work.
- rzzzt 10y agoA sealed box with glove access could be filled with Helium. Edit: apparently it's not easy even to take the lid off of these drives :) See https://youtu.be/ANMtvYnI1gQ https://youtu.be/ANMtvYnI1gQ
- sytelus 10y agoI'd few of 8GB ones and they were truely horrible. They ran super slow and then to top it of they started making noises with very light usage within months. I'm just not sure how reliable these are...
- simon1573 10y ago8TB, right?
- miahi 10y agoAre you talking about these helium-filled drives or the more common and way less expensive Archive drives (shingled)?
- drivethrowinguy 10y agoAre you sure that you had Seagate EC drives, and not Seagate Archive drives? The latter are DM-SMR and therefore poorly suited to pretty much anything doing random write I/O (e.g. rsyncing directory trees, rdiff-backup and so on). However, with the correct workload (object store, log-oriented storage) they perform admirably, especially for their price. With DM-SMR strange noises and paranormal drive activity has to be expected since the drive can spend considerable time flushing it's PMR buffer (~16 GiB) to the shingled zones.
- wfunction 10y agoTangential question: What's the absolute cheapest storage per byte right now for someone who doesn't care about speed? Is it like a 4TB HDD? Any specific examples would be appreciated.
- moe 10y ago> 4TB HDD Yes. It's what Amazon Glacier runs on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier#Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier#Storage The Backblaze blog is also a great place to learn about a large storage deployment: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-20...
- wfunction 10y agoThanks! Side question, but how is Amazon Glacier consdiered affordable? For 4TB it costs $192/year... yet you could buy two 4TB HDDs at that price yourself and use one for redundancy and the other for immediate retrieval. What's the benefit of putting your data on Glacier when it costs twice as much as keeping it yourself, and probably takes longer to retrieve too? [1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- e12e 10y agoLike the rest of Amazon (excepting the Cloud Storage, which is all-you-can-eat for personal use only) - it's not affordable. Unless you might need 400 4TB drives, and keep track of which one have what on them, which are up-to-date, which are in which fire/disaster zones etc. At that point the price starts to look more reasonable.
- noja 10y agoYou are comparing a single failure-prone disk to something highly-available.
- yk 10y agoIt is offsite storage. If you store your backups all in the same place, then something may happen to the place like fire, flood or burglars.
- logicallee 10y agoIf I'm reading this right the rated workload is 45 writes of the whole disk per year[1]. Is that right? That does not seem to be a high degree of confidence by them.... [1] I divided the rated workload listed on the page by the size of the disk.
- wazoox 10y agoI don't know about the Seagate, but the HGST He drives are super reliable. I've been using them since they exist (3 years) in growing numbers (several hundreds) and I'm still waiting for the first one to fail.