HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/hgst-releases-helium-filled-10tb-hard-drive-seagate-twiddles-shingled-fingers/

by Amorymeltzer • 11 years ago

48 63 11 years ago

arstechnica.com

rsync8• 11 years ago

As a provider of cloud storage (who actually owns the infrastructure) this is both exciting and frustrating...

Exciting because we love the idea of deploying a 450TB zpool in a 4U chassis ...

Frustrating because we will have to keep reworking our price per GB.

With that in mind, our new attic/borg[1] support has dropped down to 3 cents per GB, per month to kind-of-sort-of match S3 pricing[2].

[1] http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

[2] http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years ago

Whats your current storage in a 4U chassis?

rsync8• 11 years ago

45 drives @ 4TB, but we create 15 drive raidz3 vdevs, so we lose 3 drives per vdev ... so (45-9)*4 = 144TB.

X-Istence3• 11 years ago

SuperMicro has 72 drives in a single system, with 10TB drives you are hitting 720TB in a single 4U package.

Dell also has their DSS7000, which is 90 drives in a 4U system, so 900 TB in a single 4U package...

9 Petabyte of storage in a single 42U rack...

rsync8• 11 years ago

Once you go past the 45 drive JBOD (which costs $2000 give or take) the price per slot starts to go up quickly ... the last quote we had for the supermicro 90 drive JBOD was $9000.

So if you are optimizing for rackspace, it might make sense, but if you're keeping costs down, the 45 drive chassis is the best bet.

JungleGymSam• 11 years ago

If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You.

Hey, thanks! I stopped reading there. :)

rsync8• 11 years ago

We both win!

monochromatic• 11 years ago

Frustrating because we will have to keep reworking our price per GB.

You don't have to pass every savings on to the consumer, you know.

zx2c4• 11 years ago

Does anybody take the encryption support in attic/borg seriously? They seem to be implementing their own AE construction. Maybe they did it right, but it makes be a bit uneasy. While they're at it wrapping OpenSSL, I don't know why they wouldn't use one of OpenSSL's AEAD EVPs...

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

Which of Attic or Borg would you recommend for new usage? Deduplicated always-incremental backups have appealed to me ever since I started following the development of obnam, and I'd love to switch away from duplicity and stop requiring periodic full backups.

rsync8• 11 years ago

Yes, that's the reason everyone is eschewing duplicity (which we've always loved and supported) for attic and borg.

borg appears to be much healthier as a project, has a lot of steam behind it, and has some additional flexibility in block sizes, etc., so we think that's the train to hitch your wagon to ...

rusbus• 11 years ago

Can someone comment as to why it needs to be filled with helium?

ddeck• 11 years ago

From the actual article:

"... but HGST's use of helium, which offers significantly less air resistance to the spinning platters, is probably the main one."

pinewurst• 11 years ago

Lower air resistance/friction and lower turbulence for the heads.

ishansharma• 11 years ago

So, what will happen if it leaks? Will it just get slow or stop working?

hippich• 11 years ago

why it can't be vacuumed?

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

How well have the first generations of helium drives lasted?

I'm wary of trusting my data to something that relies on incredibly good gas seals. But if there are no observed reliability issues, it seems that problem has been solved.

dangrossman• 11 years ago

They come with a 5 year warranty and 2.5M hours MTBF rating, which says something about the manufacturer's opinion of their reliability.

chefkoch2• 11 years ago

That hasn't really helped the 3TB seagate constellation drives...

X-Istence3• 11 years ago

Place where I used to work had large NetApp array's using HGST's Helium filled drives.

During the time that I was there (1 year, these had been in service longer than that), out of the 250+ drives in service we didn't have a single failure.

wazoox• 11 years ago

None ever failed me (several hundreds in production). In general, HGST drives are much more reliable than Seagate and WD anyway, but the He are supposedly even better.

ck2• 11 years ago

Isn't helium guaranteed to leak out over time because of the tiny atom size, giving these drives a most certain scheduled death?

Retra• 11 years ago

Helium diffusion is probably negligible next to the likelihood of puncturing the assembly or breakdown via normal use.

ars• 11 years ago

The helium is not under pressure, it should not leak much. A metal to metal seal should do a pretty good job of sealing it, especially with no pressure.

ScottBurson2• 11 years ago

"Guaranteed" is too strong a word, but I'm sure that engineering a seal that would hold reliably for years and could be mass-produced was a nontrivial problem. This is why everyone isn't already using helium.

miahi• 11 years ago

The great thing is that it doesn't use SMR. I have an 8TB SMR from Seagate and its write performance is bad and variable, much like the pre-TRIM SSDs. It's ok if you write a lot of stuff and then just read it (you can get >100MB/s out of it), but I often see small random writes (updates) at 3-4 IOPS, because it has to re-shingle the whole track.

praseodym• 11 years ago

They're also terrible in RAID environments: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb

electrum• 11 years ago

SMR drives are designed to be used in low-write environments such as archival, so bad performance for small random writes is to be expected.

fapjacks• 11 years ago

Great. One more drain on our Helium supply.

danieltillett2• 11 years ago

Better than party balloons. Where is the hedge fund investing in long term storage of helium?

garblegarble2• 11 years ago

I thought that was the problem with helium, it's hard to store because it leaks through everything so easily

sageabilly2• 11 years ago

I wonder if these will be recoverable by traditional data recovery means, or if opening them and exposing the platters to normal air instead of helium would mean they can't spin/run correctly.

If helium-filled HDD technology becomes more widespread I am curious about the potential impact to the data recovery market.

lallysingh• 11 years ago

You could always open them in a larger helium chamber.

sageabilly2• 11 years ago

Which would add a significant up-front cost that would have to be shouldered by the data recovery company. Potentially an issue for small shops (which most data recovery companies are.)

dogma11382• 11 years ago

Probably not but neither are SSD's, judging by how many data recovery places have went out of business I don't think it's a major consideration any more.

If it dies in an enterprise environment it would be part of a redundant array of some sort (I can't think of a single use case for such a large and expensive drive in a single drive setup), gone are the days when the 30GB HDD in the CEO's tower died and you had to rush it to some 48 hours recovery service to get that "super important" presentation they had on it (AKA his vacation pictures).

I'm pretty sure that like 90% of the current data recovery cases are from people that still carry mechanical portable drives or haven't switched to a NAS with RAID support which will never be the market segment for those drives anyhow.

jjcm• 11 years ago

I think these are gonna be too little too late for the platter drive market, especially with SSD capacities skyrocketing recently (thank you 3D NAND). Toshiba and Samsung both have announced plans for 128TB SSDs within the next 3 years - I can't really see platter drives competing with that.

HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

Related Stories