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Seagate Releases 6TB Hard Drive Sans Helium
Lucas123 (935744) writes "Seagate has released what it said is the industry's fastest hard drive with up to a 6TB capacity, matching one released by WD last year. WD's 6TB Ultrastar He6 was hermetically sealed with helium inside, something the company said was critical to reducing friction for additional platters, while also increasing power savings and reliability. Seagate, however, said it doesn't yet need to rely on Helium to achieve the 50% increase in capacity over its last 4TB drive. The company used the same perpendicular magnetic recording technology that it has on previous models, but it was able to increase areal density from 831 bits per square inch to 1,000. The new drive also comes in 2TB, 4TB and 5TB capacities and with either 12Gbps SAS or 6Gbps SATA connectivity. The six-platter, enterprise-class drive is rated to sustain about 550TB of writes per year — 10X that of a typical desktop drive."
I thought that in 21st century we are talking about Gbits/inch^2, not just bits...
Paul B.
write the partition table.
Every end has half a stick.
6 TB drive... 1000 bits/square inch... So... 6 billion square inches of real estate (14.67 mile sides of a square)?
It's like magic!
Whoa, the summary is orders magnitude off on the density. (or the drive is way bigger than an aircraft carrier.)
North's law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of bytes on magnetic storage doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after legendary porn star Peter North.
And why would you not use helium? They already seal the hard drives and it is just as easy and cheap to leave helium in the drive as some form of super clean air.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Finally a way to detect if your drive is about to crash: you start to sound like a munchkin.
Table-ized A.I.
Complete with humidity sensor.
Been a long time since I've bought Seagate as I've had great reliability from WD but out of curiosity, what's the cost?
At 1000 bits per square inch, to get 6TB you need about a third the size of Manhattan.
According to Wolfram Alpha at least:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Seagate previously made 4 x 1 TB platters and 5 x 800 GB platters. Now this drive stores 1.25 TB per platter (according to El Reg). I bet WD/HGST can replicate that very easily... 7 x 1.25 = 8.75 TB. From what we know Seagate could use shingles (shingled magnetic recording) to boost capacity but with a penalty to write speed. There was also a suggestion they could cram 6 platters in a drive without helium. Both companies are working on HAMR to replace PMR in the coming years.
It's not that WD is relying on helium, it's that WD has better technology than Seagate. By including two more platters, WD can match Seagate's capacity with older PMR platters.
And we all know it.
it's last 4TB drive
NO, NO, BAD Unkown Lamer!
"Its last 4TB drive", as opposed to "It's..... Monty Python's Flying Circus!"
In a big storage server, that could amount to few kilos, perhaps
The press blurb is full of nonsense. Not one real performance statistic. Not one.
-Matt
I'm just glad we've learned the lesson of the Ultrastar Hindenburg. Oh, the capacity!
(Too soon?)
yes. as you will find out in a couple years, SSD are more reliable in the first 2-1/2 years, then they go to shit faster than hard drives after that.
That's a lot of porn...
Just in case anyone missed it, here's the very technical video explanation by Hitachi about how perpendicular recording works.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Hmmm Let me think about this
Intel Enterprise grade SSD 800gb - I can find them for about $1800
HGST Ultrastar - Enterprise grade with Helium - 6tb - $865.
I currently have a 21tb Nas machine in this office. I don't need speed I need capacity. The cost differential is MASSIVE. So yes people buy spinning platters all the time.
Does anyone buy platters of very slow piles of rust anymore?
For bulk storage (measured in terabytes and petabytes), platters of spinning rust are the only economical solution. So for a secondary storage SAN where capacity is more important then IOPS, you fill it out with spinning rust. A 4TB enterprise SATA 7200RPM drive is about $330 right now, or about $0.08/GB. The cheapest enterprise SSDs are about 10x-20x that price.
Rust is also better for drives (or tapes) used as backups. It has better shelf stability then a SSD. Most SSDs will start to lose data after a few months of being disconnected (maybe as few as 6 months). Barring mechanical issues, traditional magnetic media holds up well over the span of years (at least a decade in most case).
Now I just wish WD would come out with a 2TB 10k RPM SATA Velociraptor 3.5" drive...
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Would love to know what the rebuild time would look like for a disk of this size. Seems impractical.
I'll link the above post next time you pretend to know what is going on in server rooms so that everyone can have a laugh.
Sometimes, just sometimes, they are on par with the competition reliability-wise. But many of their drives are lemons, far more than from other manufacturers and that has been a very long-term trend. Seagate just does not know or does not care to make drives reliable. Latest data:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014...
This one is unlike to be any better in that regard.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Whoa, the summary is orders magnitude off on the density. (or the drive is way bigger than an aircraft carrier.)
I think that you can't get past the title without an oops: "Seagate Releases 6TB Hard Drive Sans Helium"
Doesn't "sans" mean without?
Since when mechanical drives degrade during writes? Isn't that a SSD 's illness?
And 55TB / year for desktop drive sounds ridiculously low.
:wq
Some people need capacity at a low cost over speed.
Facebook for example archives billions of photos nobody will ever look at again, because among them are millions of photos that people will look at again, and it's impossible to figure out a-priori which ones will be.
At a recentish lecture they gave at Stanford, they said what they really want is write-once solid-state memory with zero standby power, and lower costs than magnetic disks.
If you think about it, the vast majority of non-cache storage is write-once, so the idea of large low-cost write-once capacity should be broadly appealing.
There was a time when Seagate was a gold standard, but nowadays certainly not. I would not trust a Seagate drive if someone gave it to me. A truly sad state of affairs. I just pity the consumers who don't know any better. Even worse that they're now tarnishing the Hitachi brand.
...work at a very high pitch!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The blurb quotes Computerworld correctly, but the Computerworld author was fuzzy headed or didn't think that the number was *WAY* low or doesn't understand that 'computer something technical stuff'. The aerial density of this drive is now at 1 Terabit per square inch, not 1000 bits per square inch (a mere difference of only 1 billion times).
No, they are all spinning aluminium or glass that are coated with none iron based magnetic materials. I don't think iron based platters have existed for many many years.
That said your post is amusingly clueless as to real world bulk storage. Unless there is some major breakthrough there is at least another five years before SSD world wide production can match spinning hard disk capacity, and that assumes hard disks stand still. On the other hand expect 15k and 10k disks to disappear over that time frame. Shipments of the faster drivers are already dramatically down as people are replacing them with SSD.
Ah, I missed WD. I thought the summary was describing the Seagate drive as being filled with He. Gotta stop that skimming through torrents of information ... oh wait, that's a different article.
The new 7,200rpm, enterprise drive also has what Craig described as a "humidity sensor" that will allow it to continue functioning in humid environments.
Finally a drive that will work in the cloud!
Please, do that. Ignorance needs nothing more than repeated public shaming.
> over it's last 4TB drive.
over its* last 4TB drive.
it's = it is
Learn this.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Believe it or not, capacity still matters.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yep,
* 7200 RPM drives are in the $0.08-$0.12 per GB range.
* 10k RPM are around $0.23-$0.30 per GB range
* 15k RPM are around $0.50-$0.57 per GB range
* Good enterprise SSDs are now down to $1.00-$1.55 per GB.
SSDs are definitely putting the squeeze on the 15k RPM drive market. Price difference is now only about 2x between 15k SAS and SSDs. So for any application where you would short-stroke the drive to get more IOPS but less capacity, SSDs edge out the 15k RPM drives.
Unless the prices on 15k RPM SAS drives drop by a factor of 2x or 3x, there's potential for enterprise SSDs to overtake them by next year.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
We measure in Qberts here.
Its called the double-dildo effect.
- Anonymous Cowyard
gots to have the pie.
Now where are my 2Tb+ 2.5" hard drives?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.