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

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

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.

5 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Great until we run out of Helium by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. Helium by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Helium by suutar · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  3. Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use by JoeyRox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum? by DCFusor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Why guess when you can know? Measure!