Western Digital Announces World's First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive (techgage.com)

Deathspawner writes: Western Digital today announced a new, helium-filled enterprise HDD that allows for 10TB capacities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). WD's latest enterprise drive, sold as the HGST Ultrastar He10, uses the PMR storage method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive.

Comments

Just one problem:

[Locke2005]

All the audio tracks you store on the drive sound really high-pitched and squeaky when you play them back...

Re:Just one problem:

[cayenne8]

Hmm...I was figuring when the drive crashes, THEN...everyone in the room starts talking funny!!!

:D

Seems legit

[ShaunC]

Tethering yourself to a bunch of helium-filled drives is a great way to get into the cloud.

Re:Seems legit

[Rakarra]

It makes for racks of drives very easy to move from one side of a data center to the other.

Re:Seems legit

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sadtrombone.com/?autoplay=true

Re:Seems legit

[Nehmo]

Tethering yourself to a bunch of helium-filled...

A real man uses hydrogen - none of this sissy helium stuff.

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon my pr0n will fit on a reasonable number of drives.

Great until we run out of Helium

[jfdavis668]

We keep finding new uses for Helium, but not new supplies.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop promoting this myth.

From http://geology.com/articles/helium/

Some natural gas fields have enough helium mingled with the gas that it can be extracted at an economical cost. A few fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume. Companies that drill for natural gas in these areas produce the natural gas, process it and remove the helium as a byproduct

And by 'byproduct' they mean blow it to the wind without a second thought. That's 7% helium by volume, just dumped as we type. Do you think the world's party balloons (or fractional amounts in hds) even come close to this volume?

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[MattskEE]

The market will provide. My understanding is that the US government is selling off its helium reserve which lowers prices and makes it uneconomical to extract a lot of it at the moment. When the reserve is depleted and prices raise back up to natural levels then collection will increase.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know what you're talking about then step aside and make room in the thread for those who do.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough, but that doesn't change the GP's point. The US is selling off it's helium reserve. Helium is needed for scientific research and medical diagnostic equipment. I'd venture to guess that the liquid helium coolant used in the LHC is one of the most expensive parts.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[aicrules]

and suddenly slashdot was silent.....

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[tibit]

Purifying helium is not hard: everything else condenses out way before it does. You just blow "dirty" helium over a sufficiently cold heat exchanger, and everything other than helium will condense on the heat exchanger. See e.g. this excellent reference.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes. The old "x is worse over here, so why do y" argument. It's tired and invalid.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

if you guessed that, you'd be so fucking amazingly wrong that you couldn't find your ass with your hand in your rectum. The superconductors are very expensive, and the massive staff working on it is also much, much more expensive (though not directly billed) than the helium. Hell, the electricity costs are an order of magnitude higher than the cost of helium.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[unixisc]

We keep finding new uses for Helium, but not new supplies.

Precisely!!! Just stick to getting SSDs into that price range, so that helium won't be needed

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

A high enough price will drive hydrogen atoms to fuse, resulting in helium. In this case, neo-classical microeconomics overrides the standard model of physics.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[unixisc]

Helium is something that is abundant outside the earth's atmosphere - since it's the by-product of hydrogen fusion at the sun, but it is limited on the earth itself. Only once we have drones out there that can travel to space and bring back helium will the supply issue be solved.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[GameboyRMH]

The problem is that the market doesn't give a fuck if helium is as cheap as air or $10m for a tiny glass vial full of it that sits in a billionaire's curio cabinet. Either counts as the market "providing," and the latter scenario could occur if sources are sufficiently scarce - which, again, the market can do nothing about. The reserve selloff could actually lead to even more wasteful behavior like the natural gas industry venting helium as mentioned further up the page.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Archangel Michael]

Here's the problem right now. Storage. We don't need spinning drives to store stuff, but we continue to use them because they are still cheaper than the alternative. The limitations of spinning drives is now starting to really impact access to data on those drives. There is too much data on these slow devices and that is the problem.

My prediction is, that in less than 3 years, you'll see the final death blow to Spinning disks (though they will remain like Floppies forever for legacy reasons) as they are finally replaced by SSDs that are on new buses that offer larger storage, longer lifespans and faster access.When you see your first 16 TB SSD drive (next year**) you will see why Spinning drives are already at the end of their era.

Pretty soon, Netcraft is going to confirm it.

** http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

There is no scarcity of helium in the first place, and, just like any other commodity, the market will seek a price where supply meets demand. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices. If helium becomes valuable to produce because the demand grows, the the natural gas fields which today just release all that useless helium will start capturing it and producing 2 products.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[theendlessnow]

Maybe we could farm Helium from WD HGST drives?

I guess that's like having George Lucas fix Star Wars Ep. I-III, sort of ridiculous.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[suutar]

... makes it uneconomical to capture, you mean? Extraction happens as a byproduct of extracting the natural gas, as far as I'm aware; it's just a question of whether it's captured or thrown away.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Helium-3 is used to detect neutrons. This isotope is what is in short supply, but high demand.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/lam1/

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm... no.

This is a "x is worse over here because you're not doing y".

So stop bitching about "X" and start doing "y".

It's tired and completely valid.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[brantondaveperson]

I'm pretty sure that Helium is one of those things that you can't just make with current technology. Once it's gone out of the atmosphere, which is where it generally ends up, it's gone. Precisely how long this will take is very hard to say, but it will happen. And unlike fossil fuels, there is no substitute for helium that I know of.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

None of that says that it's scarce, or that we could possibly run out before it becomes trivial to get more, or that Helium used in production is a non-trivial contributor to total Helium loss. Hand-wavey doomsday arguments just aren't that interesting.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[brantondaveperson]

So here's how it works.

Disaster is predicted. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and take steps to avoid the disaster. In this case, that would probably involve writing legislation around wasting helium during natural gas extraction - in other words, pushing back against the market's tendency to ignore problems until it's too late - or something similar.

As a result of these actions, disaster is averted. A consequence of this type of thing generally working much of the time, is that people find themselves believing that doomsday predictions are all bunk. Take the year 2000 bug, for instance. Disaster was predicted, many people spent a great deal of time and money ensuring the the disaster would be avoided. It worked. And everyone uses it as an example of how the doomsdayers are always wrong.

In this case, helium is scarce. It can't be made currently, nor does it look like we'll be making it in industrial quantities any time soon, if ever. Helium is also wasted, with something like 8% going into party balloons so that kids can get upset when they either deflate or escape into the sky. I'm sorry that you don't find this interesting, but fortunately there are people out there who do find it interesting, and luckily they're not the type of people who just believe that the market will fix it somehow.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't? I don't know about you, but I'm not gung-ho enough to entrust my storage to SSDs just yet. Yes, you should have back-ups, but recovering from them isn't IMO amusing enough to switch out hard drives which until further notice not only continues to be cheaper per data unit, but also continues to be a damned sight more predictable and reliable. Maybe that will change some day, but that day ain't today, sunshine.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

So here's how it works.

Someone poorly versed in science invents a disaster scenario. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and dismiss the argument as no solid evidence was presented, and speculation isn't the thing they're interested in, so they stop paying attention. Some politician sees the opportunity, and writes legislation that, what a coincidence, happens to benefit some of his donors while mandating that people give up just a little to avert this alleged disaster.

As a claimed result of these actions, disaster is averted, and anyone actually interested in science and evidence who finally hears about the law and complains is clearly a denier, or works for some evil corporations (you can tell the evil ones because they don't donate to said politician).

So, no, I'm not interested in buying your tiger rock without some evidence of tigers in the neighborhood, and the tiger-deterring effectiveness the rock. Even though I accept certain existence of tigers in the world, that's not really the important fact here.

It's the same pet peeve I have about low-flow toilets madated nation-wide:
1) Prove there's a need to conserve water where I live
2) Prove that the amount of water used in toilets is non-trivial
3) Prove that this solution significantly reduces the amount of water used in toilets.

If you can't prove all three, fuck off with low-flow toilets.

So, again, the burden of proof is on you that (1) we stand any real chance of exhausting the Earths helium supply before fusion is easy (or grabbing it from off-planet, but that seems further out), and (2) the thing you want to ban is a significant contributor to the problem, and (3) the ban will actually work to achieve that goal, unlike say drug laws.

I've never seen any evidence for (1), and I not seeing how (2) would apply to hard drives. (3) I'll give you.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[brantondaveperson]

1) There's a need to conserve helium because it's non-renewable.
2) Use in hard-drives specifically isn't relevant. It's probably a waste, given that there are better technologies, but I don't think many of these particular drives are likely to be sold. I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out
3) Thanks


I've got no idea about low-flow toilets, except that it sounds a bit gross, and American toilets are weird.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know what you're talking about, then asking questions is the best way to remedy that. Step aside and make room in the thread for those who are interested in contributing.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[shione]

"Helium is needed for scientific research and medical diagnostic equipment."

Whoever pays the most will always be able to get what they want. Getting helium for scientific and medical purposes more than likely gets priority too. I wouldn't be worried about hard drives 'wasting' helium. Mechanical hard drives are on their way out anyway. The only thing going for them is their massive amount of storage space and the only reason SSDs haven't caught up is because the SSD manufacturers would rather milk the market (who wouldn't?)

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

There's a need to conserve helium because it's non-renewable.

That's not important. Everything is non-renewable on some scale. Solar power is not renewable on some scale. Fusion is non-renewable on some scale. That's not the question I asked. You answered the question you liked, instead of the question I asked. Did you think I wouldn't notice?

I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out

So, for any specific thing you want to address, you still need to demonstrate that that specific thing is worthwhile. If helium becomes scare, the price will rice, and people will use less. Until you prove (1), I'm free to assume that people will just produce more (since they're venting it anyway right now), and so demand will be met with new supply, just as it is with, oil, natural gas, food, and basically everything else people have been predicting we'd run out of for the last 150 years.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[jabuzz]

To produce a useful amount of helium by this method would require fusing sufficient hydrogen to literally boil
the oceans of the world.

The problem with helium is that once it is vented into the atmosphere it is unrecoverably lost to outer space.

At least filling hard drives with the stuff is accomplishing something useful. I contrast this with a party balloon that could just as easily be filled with hydrogen gas, and would just make a slightly louder bang when popped as a result.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but then at least ask your question in the right thread. That guy asked a question about purity in a thread about dwindling supplies.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[omnichad]

But the already-released helium will never be recovered (and will probably have escaped Earth's atmosphere).

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes it the right thread.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[RockDoctor]

If helium becomes valuable to produce because the demand grows, the the natural gas fields which today just release all that useless helium will start capturing it and producing 2 products.

How are the natural gas fields of today going to capture helium in the future.

Oh, you're making the assumption that the field producing today (and allegedly venting helium into the atmosphere) are still going to be producing in 5, 10, 20 whenever years when you think the helium price will rise. Some of them may be. And some of them - increasing numbers as you go further into the future - will not be producing at that future date. This is irrespective of whether they're produced by conventional non-hydraulic fracturing technology or conventional hydraulic fracturing technology.

I wonder just how they go about capturing the helium in such a field. I'd guess the simple thing to do would be to capture the headspace gas after producing LNG, and then process that down to drop out as much of the N2 as you can, then compress the remainder for sale as "technical helium" - good for balloons and some forms of welding, but not for cryogenics without more processing.

I'll ask the test spread's chemists if they know - or indeed if they even analyse for He.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[swalve]

The market can't predict the future! It can't tell the difference between abundant and cheap.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[swalve]

Exactly. Allah will provide.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

The market reflects the best efforts of people with a great deal of money on the line to predict the future. When it looks like a real shortage is on the horizon, you see stuff like people buying vast amounts of oil, loading it into tankers, and storing the oil to be sold into the predicted crunch. The wisdom of crowds is never perfect, but it can be OK.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[swalve]

Right, but the horizon the market sees is much nearer than what others can see.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

Those "others" could make billions if they were actually better than guessing. But there are no such experts. Lots of "peak oil" predictors though, and Malthus never seems to rest.

Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't helium leak out of things shockingly quickly? What's the expected lifetime of the helium within the drive, and when will it stop operating with... whatever helium adds to the equation, here?

Re:Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

They will just shorten the warranty again, no problems.

Re:Helium

[coolmoe2]

I know its uncool to RTFA here but I think this was notable.

"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"

So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.

Re:Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Less turbulence when disk is spinning due to a lower density than air.

Theoretically, the same thing could be achieved with hydrogen, with the slight problem that in presence of oxygen, hydrogen is highly flammable.

Re:Helium

[Seraphim1982]

Why lower lifetime?

If I start with the drive full of helium, and then some leaks out shouldn't the density of the gas in the drive then be lower? And if less dense gas reduces strain shouldn't the lifetime of the drive then increase?

Re:Helium

[macs4all]

They will just shorten the warranty again, no problems.

HGST drives have a 3 year warranty. That's fairly reasonable for a consumer-level drive.

Re:Helium

[macs4all]

I know its uncool to RTFA here but I think this was notable.

"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"

So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.

2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.

I think that will work.

Re:Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Thex Ultrastar drives have 5 year warranty

Re:Helium

[plover]

The MTTF makes a big difference to large installations. (I don't know what MTFB is besides a typo in the article -- Mean Time to Fail Badly, perhaps? In any case, MTTF is the better measure of hard drives as they're pretty much not worth repairing, as MTBF would measure.)

We have one installation that operates 60,000 hard drives that spin a total of 24*60000 = 1,440,000 hours per day. A MTTF of 2.5 million hours means I can expect one of these drives to fail every other day. While that would be much better than our current rate of 12 failures per day, and would save us a lot of money on maintenance contracts, it doesn't mean the drives are impervious to failure. It just means that their failures are less expensive than our current drives.

I also have a hard time believing any disk manufacturer's claims for longevity, because we often prove them wrong. We bought a handful of "enterprise class" drives for a dozen workstations that claimed a 1.2 million hour MTTF. We had 8 out of 24 drives fail within 50,000 hours (5 years), for an actual MTTF of less than 150,000 hours (the failures happened after burn-in but before the 5 year mark, which is when the machines were replaced.) Claims of 2.5 million hours MTTF just don't ring true.

Re:Helium

[ScentCone]

If I start with the drive full of helium, and then some leaks out shouldn't the density of the gas in the drive then be lower? And if less dense gas reduces strain shouldn't the lifetime of the drive then increase?

You're assuming it's under pressure. Exactly the opposite. Helium "leaking out" is really normal outside air leaking in. The atmosphere inside the drive enclosure thus becomes denser, robbing life from the device.

Re:Helium

[fnj]

2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.

MTBF is NOT the same as expected/rated life. To equate the two is the oldest, most naive misconception in the book. MTBF gives the number of drive-hours between failures, IN A LARGE POPULATION of FRESH drives. For a 2.5 million hour MTBF, if you have 10,000 drives operating, then you expect one failure every 2500 hours. That's 3-1/2 months. Right from the beginning. It does not account for wear. In fact, the failure rate function will not be a straight line. It will rise as the drives age. When the failure rate read off that line becomes very large, you have reached the limit on expected life.

Expected/rated life is determined by analyzing wear factors. They usually don't spec this figure to the user, but it is well known to be on the order of 5 years for a good quality drive that is not probing some kind of new territory in terms of design/technology.

Just for one example of how/why the drive wears out, consider the spindle bearings. They are prelubricated. That lubrication does not last forever, and there are no "oil here" stickers. Helium leakage is just another, new factor to add to all the other wear factors that drives are subject to.

Re:Helium

[greenfruitsalad]

also, i wouldn't worry about helium escaping, since most metals aren't porous enough for that. my guess is WD will wrap the drive in kitchen foil and all will be fine and dandy.

Re:Helium

[macs4all]

Thex Ultrastar drives have 5 year warranty

Hmmm. I thought I saw three the other day on Amazon.

Even better!

Re:Helium

[Seraphim1982]

Then you are not worried about helium leaking. You're worried about oxygen and nitrogen leaking in. Thankfully those are all WAY easier to stop then helium, and a properly designed device shouldn't have trouble.

Re:Helium

[tsqr]

Just dropped by to point out that an MTBF of 2.5 million hours does not mean that the drive will operate for 2.5 million hours before it fails.

Re:Helium

[suutar]

less dense gas also provides less of a cushion for the drive heads. Lose too much and you get head crashes.

Re:Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.

That number does not mean what you think it means. You can look up the precise term, but here's a quicker explanation:
If 5 million of these devices (2.5/(1/2 chance of failure) are made and powered up, 1 will fail every hour.

It does NOT mean that they'll all last 2.5M hours and then go poof.

Re:Helium

[macs4all]

2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.

That number does not mean what you think it means. You can look up the precise term, but here's a quicker explanation: If 5 million of these devices (2.5/(1/2 chance of failure) are made and powered up, 1 will fail every hour.

It does NOT mean that they'll all last 2.5M hours and then go poof.

No shit.

That's why it's a MEAN (one type of averaging) time between Failures (or MEAN Time To Failure MTTF, since, as someone pointed out, hard drives are rarely "serviced").

But it does mean that in your home computer (with one or two drives) or a consumer-grade NAS (with a typical 4 drive setup), it does mean that there is a fairly good (but not exactly zero) chance that you will replace (or decommission) the drive because of an upgrade before it actually fails. But if you're a Datacenter with 10,000 of them...

Re:Helium

[rgbatduke]

I suspect that it is every bit as much used for its high thermal conductivity. Sure, less strain on the motor and if there are lots and lots of platters that could be an issue. But it also helps to keep the whole thing cool.

Re:Helium

[larryjoe]

The MTTF makes a big difference to large installations. (I don't know what MTFB is besides a typo in the article -- Mean Time to Fail Badly, perhaps? In any case, MTTF is the better measure of hard drives as they're pretty much not worth repairing, as MTBF would measure.)

We have one installation that operates 60,000 hard drives that spin a total of 24*60000 = 1,440,000 hours per day. A MTTF of 2.5 million hours means I can expect one of these drives to fail every other day. While that would be much better than our current rate of 12 failures per day, and would save us a lot of money on maintenance contracts, it doesn't mean the drives are impervious to failure. It just means that their failures are less expensive than our current drives.

I also have a hard time believing any disk manufacturer's claims for longevity, because we often prove them wrong. We bought a handful of "enterprise class" drives for a dozen workstations that claimed a 1.2 million hour MTTF. We had 8 out of 24 drives fail within 50,000 hours (5 years), for an actual MTTF of less than 150,000 hours (the failures happened after burn-in but before the 5 year mark, which is when the machines were replaced.) Claims of 2.5 million hours MTTF just don't ring true.

MTBF is what the spec sheet says, but AFR (annualized failure rate) is what the manufacturers pay attention to. A MTBF of 2.5 million hours translates to 0.35% AFR, which is pretty low. However, looking at Backblaze's studies shows that there are drive models that get pretty close to the 1 to 2 million hours MTBF equivalent of AFR. Of course, there's a difference between manufacturers, and this WD drive is actually a HGST drive, and HGST drives tend to be more reliable. There are also differences between models and failure rates reflecting early-life failures versus the "bottom of the bathtub" behavior.

Re:Helium

[plover]

First, it's MTBF, not "MTFB". Mean Time Between Failures.

"MTFB" was a direct quote from The Fine Article, which was either a typo or an idiot editor, and was propagated by the /. poster. It was a minor attempt at a joke. I know exactly what MTBF is.

MTTF is useful when the wear isn't actionable. MTBF would imply that I could do some maintenance like replace the bearings on a hard drive that has 100,000 hours on it and hope to get another 100,000 hours of life from it; but hard drives simply aren't economically serviceable components.

Re:Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.

MTBF is NOT the same as expected/rated life.

No shit. Maybe that is what 'mean' means?

To equate the two is the oldest, most naive misconception in the book. MTBF gives the number of drive-hours between failures, IN A LARGE POPULATION of FRESH drives.

No shit. Maybe that is what 'mean' means?

For a 2.5 million hour MTBF, if you have 10,000 drives operating, then you expect one failure every 2500 hours. That's 3-1/2 months. Right from the beginning. It does not account for wear. In fact, the failure rate function will not be a straight line. It will rise as the drives age. When the failure rate read off that line becomes very large, you have reached the limit on expected life.

Expected/rated life is determined by analyzing wear factors. They usually don't spec this figure to the user, but it is well known to be on the order of 5 years for a good quality drive that is not probing some kind of new territory in terms of design/technology.

Just for one example of how/why the drive wears out, consider the spindle bearings. They are prelubricated. That lubrication does not last forever, and there are no "oil here" stickers. Helium leakage is just another, new factor to add to all the other wear factors that drives are subject to.

Wow. You really don't know what 'mean' means.

Re: Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to be mean about it.

Re:Helium

[omnichad]

The air/helium is a fluid bearing, keeping the heads above the platters while they rotate. And it also dissipates heat from the spinning platters. So the head will be more likely to crash and the platters are more likely to overheat as the helium leaks out.

Re: Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it means something!

SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[foxalopex]

I have an SMR 8TB Seagate drive which is marked as an archival drive. It's worked well so far. The problem with Shingle Magnetic Recording drives which I have noticed is that occasionally the drive will "stall" while it rearranges data. This is probably extremely bad for some raid systems as the paranoid ones might think the drive has prematurely died. Still this drive was inexpensive for its size and stores a LOT of data which is handy for backing up my actual RAID NAS system. Just don't use a drive like this in your Raid or you might run into serious problems.

I worry about these helium drives leaking their helium eventually and dying. They claim to have a sealed unit where the seal will last for years which is hopefully the case but you never know...

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[JoeyRox]

Currently SMR implementations increase density by only 30%. IMO that's not worth the performance trade-off for anything other than pure archival/backup applications.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[gstoddart]

From what I've seen over the years, there's always someone for whom storage density is always a plus, no matter the cost.

The rest of us thank them and wait until the price comes down.

I figure right now, someone with highly specific storage needs is trying to see how soon they can get these.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[Anonymous Coward]

If the price is right, I'll take it.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[Lumpy]

They will last as long as the warranty, and if not, here's a refurb for you!

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[MachineShedFred]

They probably sealed the enclosure just good enough that something else (mechanical bearings, motor, etc.) will likely fail before gaseous exchange becomes the problem.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[goarilla]

I've been worrying about SMR drives reliability. If the power gets killed and the drive is updating a block not exactly adjacent to the guard zone doesn't it corrupt the overlapping track as well ?

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been worrying about SMR drives reliability. If the power gets killed and the drive is updating a block not exactly adjacent to the guard zone doesn't it corrupt the overlapping track as well ?

No.

They all have flash memory that buffers the data as it is being reshingled.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[goarilla]

Ah so the SMR drives have bigger NVRAM chips.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]. Writes to SMR HDD get buffered in a staging area of the disk and then the staged writes get merged into the targeted shingled section.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm worried about the anecdotal story out there about a local media? error that corrupted files across many files. Maybe one of the staging areas got corrupted and uncommitted writes that had not yet been written to the other parts of the disk got destroyed. So maybe SMR is more susceptible to "file-decentralized" data corruption because the recently written data is all physically localized first before eventually being committed to shingled rings.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[thegarbz]

Currently SMR implementations increase density by only 30%.

Yes but what does it do price wise? When the entire competition is chasing helium it makes for a very attractive alternative.
I only just bought one of these SMR drives (I did my research and I'm only using it for a backup anyway), but one thing that blew me away was that when I graphed price vs size to find the cheapest drive, this year was the first time ever that the cheapest drive per GB was also the largest one. Normally it's about half or 1/3rd of the size of the largest one. I was expecting to come out of the shop with 2x 3TB drives, not 1x 8TB one.

cue the helium jokes

[sribe]

But I've got some helium-filled drives, and the mechanical noises from head movement etc are actually distinctively different and higher-pitched.

10TB hard drives use the integrated face system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Western digital announces that the new hard drives use the integrated face system to store data.

Lighter laptops. Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighter laptops. Great news

Should be easier on batteries too right?

What to do with dead HDD's, suck the air err helium out!

HDD tip

[Anonymous Coward]

We all end up with a dead drive sooner or later. But don't throw it out! Open that fucker and remove the arms. Ha ha! You can't, can you? They're held in place by mental magnets. Get yourself some kind of leverage tool and prise those cunts apart. Ta da! You now have a pair of ridiculously power magnets.

SMR is a stopgap that will disappear in 2-3 years

[JoeyRox]

The trade-offs are too great. HAMR will hopefully be viable soon.

I see they cut corners .. off the HDD

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be anti-cylon design. Battlestar use Only.

Re:Plains trains and Hard Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Business class Helium Seating Priority.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[Thagg]

I agree that Hydrogen sounds like a better approach.

1) orders of magnitudes cheaper
2) even less dense
3) much larger molecules, so leakage should be far less

Not inert, true, but that should be possible to deal with.

SMR can not typically be used natively?

[Anonymous Coward]

"SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates"

Only host-managed are that way. There are device managed drives as well.

Is there any data to show that "typically" many SMR drives are host-based instead of drive-based?

Re:SMR can not typically be used natively?

[goarilla]

I wonder if there are actual "host based" hard drives out there. To me it just looks like an academic distinction without a real world application.

Re:SMR can not typically be used natively?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if it's just different firmware or even if the firmware on a drive-managed SMR drive just needs to be put into a different mode to become a host based SMR drive.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[Sir Holo]

I agree that Hydrogen sounds like a better approach.

1) orders of magnitudes cheaper
2) even less dense
3) much larger molecules, so leakage should be far less

Not inert, true, but that should be possible to deal with.

Nice thought on #2, but incorrect. Hydrogen diffuses through steel quite quickly.

Hydrogen is the bane of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) systems, which have stainless steel walls 1/2 to 1 inch in thickness. New system? Hydrogen comes out of the steel itself, as it contains some. But with time, that might be depleted, but no —more comes in from the atmosphere, or from any replaced components or new seals.

For UHV systems, helium is quite useful for finding leaks. Microscopic or even nanoscopic pathways for the helium atoms to make their way in. One frequently has poor base vacuum, and must hunt around blowing helium on suspected parts. These could be anything: micro-crack in a weld, stress-crack in a feed-through, an improperly bolted seal, a loose bolt. It can get very fiddly.

No thanks...

[Lumpy]

Longevity on these will suck, Helium seeps out of everything eventually. so these drives will not just fail for normal reasons but instead fail due to helium leaking out and drawing in standard atmosphere.

Re:No thanks...

[blind biker]

You are right - partial pressure in the atmosphere is extremely low, so the helium will leak out. The seals have to be made to much more stringent standards in order to keep He in the drive, but that won't help for long. It will, however, keep nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 from entering the drive. Essentially, you will end up with a drive filled with very low pressure helium - essentially, vacuum, and the heads will have crashed against the surface of the platters long before that.

Re:No thanks...

[MachineShedFred]

They just need to make the seals good enough that the helium stays in longer than it takes for some other critical component to fail. Nothing lasts forever, including non-helium filled drives.

depends on pressure difference, which can be zero

[raymorris]

The permeation rate of helium is roughly:

diffusion rate of seal material / thickness of material * time * pressure difference

The pressure difference term can be made approximately zero using a diaphragm to allow for changes in atmospheric pressure. Any value * 0 = 0, so permeation (leakage) is roughly zero.

Additionally, some seal materials work quite well. But again that's easy when the inside and outside are the same pressure - there's nothing causing the helium to exit, even if it could pass through easily.

Who cares if it's cheaper? Not enough volume.

[SuperKendall]

There's so little space inside a drive to fill, I don't think cost of the gas itself would change by more than a few pennies.

Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[4wdloop]

So why not vacuum?
Is it much harder to achieve UHV than filling the cavity with inert gas?

What did you do to my harddrive?!

[funky_vibes]

And why is your voice so funny?

Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[Alwin Henseler]

The reason will be the pressure differential. With vacuum inside, a drive's housing would have to be much stronger. Read: thicker, bulkier, heavier, more expensive, and leaving less room inside for platters / heads etc.

Note to purchasers

[ThatsNotPudding]

By US government edict, these drives cannot be exported to 1930s Germany. We instead recommend our Hydrogen line of Flash drives.

Re:Note to purchasers

[bobbied]

That's OK, we will just assemble them overseas and ship direct.

Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[DCFusor]

The real reason is that the heads need some medium to "fly" on. When they rub the disk surface, it's called a crash for a reason.

Re: Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[Anonymous Coward]

The drive heads rely on gas in the drive to work correctly.

Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when the head rubs the disk surface...

wait, what were we talking about?

More fracking means less He

[dlenmn]

The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies -- which is not something you refuted. You quoted something about known supplies. It could well be that the GP's claim is true. Most of our *new* natural gas supplies are from fracking, which results in very little helium.

Moreover, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. You note that, "*A few* fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume," and then make the unsubstantiated claim that none of this He is recovered (which, if true, would prove what, exactly?) and that these few fields contain more than enough He for everyone. Citations please! The fact is that He prices are going up, and Econ 101 says the cause is demand increasing faster than supply.

Re:More fracking means less He

[JackieBrown]

The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies

The title of his post (which you changed) said exactly that.

Re:More fracking means less He

[dlenmn]

Fair enough. Cut off the first sentence of my post if you'd like; the rest still stands.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[flux]

Hydrogen would also provide a super-cool secure erase facility! And most excellent data center fires :-o.

Yeah, I guess the amount of hydrogen would be quite small..

Hitachi?

[JDHannan]

Did Hitachi release a swingin song about Shingled Magnetic Recording? The Perpendicular one was great!

Re:Hitachi?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Get perpendicular

Re:Hitachi?

[Anonymous Coward]

HGST isn't Hitachi anymore, they're somewhat sensitive about that fact.

Wayback Wednesday?

[jtownatpunk.net]

I thought 8 and 10tb helium-filled drives had been around for a while. Like a year or so.

Re:Wayback Wednesday?

[Anonymous Coward]

For enterprise drives and only for sale to enterprise customers. This is the first crack consumers have at them.

Re:Wayback Wednesday?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 6 TB/8 TB helium were PMR. The 10 TB helium were SMR. This is 10TB helium PMR.

8TB non-helium PMR was Seagate Enterprise Capacity/NAS v5 launched in September. It's orderable for $445 according to google.com/shopping.

Totally worth it

[SuperKendall]

If you can have one backup drive to have to manage an offsite variant off, that is already far better than two.

MTFB investigates head crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

The Magnetic Technology Failure Board investigates head crashes and assigns blame to procedures and operators, much like the NTSB.

Re:SMR is a stopgap that will disappear in 2-3 yea

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI the HAMR road map is SMR.
Perhaps there will be non-SMR version as well.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[R3d M3rcury]

Hydrogen would also provide a super-cool secure erase facility! And most excellent data center fires :-o.

I was thinking about that. "Gee, let's put a flammable gas inside something that can get really hot! What could possibly go wrong?"

However, Hydrogen has a pretty high auto-ignition temperature (over 900 degrees F), so your computer would have probably melted into slag long before your hard drive exploded.

Yeah, I guess the amount of hydrogen would be quite small...

True, but figure it's a data center so you have a whole lot of them. Of course, they wouldn't all go up at once, so you'd have more of a pop-pop-pop than a big kaboom.

Re:depends on pressure difference, which can be ze

[fnj]

Wrong. Diffusion depends on the PARTIAL pressure difference of the helium. For helium at one atmosphere on one side, and the atmosphere itself on the other side, the partial pressure difference is one full atmosphere.

Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[MachineShedFred]

drive heads use Bernoulli's principle to 'fly' an incredibly small distance above the platter. Take the gaseous medium out, and you end up with a record needle instead of a magnetic read / write head.

This is an enterprise-class drive

[PeeAitchPee]

To be clear: most people buying these types of drives don't buy them one at a time to be shoved into a workstation, or even to be used as a backup. They buy 10+ or more at a time to assemble into some sort of RAID. They are most likely looking to maximize available terabytes per rack unit in a datacenter. Things like cost are secondary in these scenarios -- it costs what it costs. 7200RPM is great, especially when a large number of drives are striped together with RAID 10 or something similar (because with RAID 10, the more drives you add, the faster things go). Latency? Meh, we'll front-end the array with a nice SSD-based read-write cache (also RAID10), usually one that's managed right from the same controller card. And like most new enterprise-class drives, these have SAS3 interfaces -- that's 12 Gb/S. With arrays built with these drives, your network bandwidth and OS offload likely become the bottleneck very quickly. Make no mistake -- the target buyer is someone who wants to build very dense, fast, large arrays of drives -- think JBOD for virtualization, or a huge fast fileshare box with a bunch of fast NICs, or a big database instance, etc. So -- until SSDs come in these capacities -- just because *you* won't use this in your gamer rig / IDE / whatever, doesn't mean there isn't a market for huge, relatively fast spinning rust drives.

Re:This is an enterprise-class drive

[sshir]

SSDs are already at 16TB. Samsung showed one. And it does not matter how much it costs - you can't get an HD of such capacity for any price.

Re:This is an enterprise-class drive

[Lawrence_Bird]

Nor can you get your precious samsung vaporware.

Re:Sorta!

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon my pr0n will fit on a reasonable number of drives.

And your g1rlfriends will fit in a similarly theoretical space.

Thanks for the correction

[raymorris]

Thanks for that.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[goarilla]

3) much larger molecules, so leakage should be far less

Sure it isn't the other way around. Let me quote wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

The smallest molecule is the diatomic hydrogen (H2), with a bond length of 0.74 Å.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oxygen.

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[Anonymous Coward]

2) even less dense

Nice thought on #2, but incorrect. Hydrogen diffuses through steel quite quickly.

We can solve this by making the cases out of hydrogen!

Filled with He

[hcs_$reboot]

So if you happen to not find your HDs, look at the ceiling

Latest Buggy Wagon

[argee]

Hard Disk Drives are so obsolete. This is like Atlanta Coach Works announcing their latest, greatest, horse drawn buggy. It is lower, longer, wider and has
more chrome than their 2015 model. Has gas shocks in the suspension, and electric whips for the horses. But still a buggy. I'd rather drive my car.
In 2016 ... SSD is the answer.

Re:Latest Buggy Wagon

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story brah. I appreciate that you're so monied, but the rest of us don't have $1300 to plunk down on enough SSDs. Not to mention you'll need to spend more to make up for the likely infant mortality between enough SSDs to build up your array. And the extra money for all the controllers you'll need.

Good for 1.9 years of uncompressed chipmunk songs

[dsmatthews9379]

in stereo!

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[Anonymous Coward]

A helium "molecule" is just a single helium atom. It's .31 Angtsroms. Much smaller than a hydrogen molecule.

The comments about hydrogen and steel not getting along, though, are pretty devastating.

Why does SMR require an OS update

[Bruce Dawson]

The post says:

> Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS

but gives no reference or explanation for this claim. Searching for this claim finds it repeated verbatim on many sites, but no explanation.

The details of the recording technology rarely matter to the OS which treats the device as block-level storage. I'm not saying it's impossible for SMR to require an OS update, but I would like an explanation or reference.

It sounds like problem is that an SMR drive can't write to a single track, so using it *efficiently* requires an OS update, much like SSDs. But some clarification would be nice.

Re:Sorta!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, she'll still be big.