Seagate Releases 6TB Hard Drive Sans Helium 147
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."
~1000 *Bits* per square inch? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought that in 21st century we are talking about Gbits/inch^2, not just bits...
Paul B.
Re:~1000 *Bits* per square inch? (Score:5, Funny)
Its just sad that in the 21st century we are still using Gbits/inch^2 and not Gbits/cm^2.
Re:~1000 *Bits* per square inch? (Score:5, Funny)
Its just sad that in the 21st century we are still using Gbits/inch^2 and not Gbits/cm^2.
Why is that sad? An inch is 2.54 cm, so a square inch is 2.54*2.54=6.45 cm^2. If we switched from inches to cm, instead of 6 TB, this disk would not even hold 1 TB.
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And that is the perfect example of why we aren't using Gbits/cm^2. You went for it hook line and sinker and said something *really* stupid. :P
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It's all getting a bit bitty methinks.
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Whoosh!
And you got the unit conversion wrong! Gold!
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Re:~1000 *Bits* per square inch? (Score:5, Funny)
Imperial or metric bits?
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^ winner.
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You don't get into the imperial or metric part until you're talking Kilo bits
Metric Kilo = 1000
Imperial Kilo = 1024
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Imperial bits automatically reject the force.
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Dude, sorry but you just got tripped up by Muphry's Law [wikipedia.org].
Happens to all of us, sooner or later...
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Slashdot is hiring fired AP writers now?
H2 drive (Score:1)
(Too soon?)
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Why not Hydrogen? Must utility generators are hydrogen cooled due to hydrogen's low viscosity and high thermal conductivity.
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I thought that in 21st century we are talking about Gbits/inch^2, not just bits...
Paul B.
That caught my eye as well. Assuming 1000 bits per square inch, we're talking about:
6 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 8 / 1000 = 48,000,000,000 square inches to store 6TB at 1000 bits per in^2.
1 Mbit per square inch makes a lot more sense, putting it at 48 square inches, or about 8 square inches per platter.
Re:~1000 *Bits* per square inch? (Score:5, Informative)
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1 Mbit per square inch makes a lot more sense
Oh, derp. Make that 1000 Gbit per square inch. Worst part of no edit on Slashdot is all the simple math mistakes irrevocably left for posterity :)
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how can you have 8 square inches on a round platter?
if the inches are square then they can't be round at least at that pixel density.
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Who cares, at least my music will no longer have a funny pitch on playback.
Let me just (Score:2)
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RAID 6 is only one more than RAID 5.
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You think you could afford enough of these to facilitate raid 5, eh? Lol.
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RAID 1+5 is the answer. 6 6 TB disks disks gets you 12 TB (which is really about 10.9 TB).
A1 A2
B1 B2
P1 P2
A1 and A2 are mirrors of each other (RAID 1).
A, B, and P form a RAID 5 array.
If A1 goes down, it gets rebuilt from A2.
If A2 goes down while rebuilding A1, you can recover A1 from B1 and P1.
If B1 or P1 then goes down, you can recover both it and A2 (and thus A1) from B2 and P2.
You can survive any 3 drive failures. You can potentially survive a 4th drive failure, too:
XX XX
XX B2
P1 P2
If P1 goes down, you c
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Of course, instead of going bankrupt after spending all my money in 6TB hard drives, I could just enjoy myself for now, and got bankrupt later on when one of by four 3TB disks fail.
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If that's bankrupting you you likely don't have data worth replicating that much.
Besides, the point is to spend $XXXX on RAID instead of $XXXXX on data recovery or $XXXXXX on lost business / court settlements.
Big Drive (Score:1)
6 TB drive... 1000 bits/square inch... So... 6 billion square inches of real estate (14.67 mile sides of a square)?
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Also, "increase in capacity over it's last 4TB drive".
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Whoa, the summary is orders magnitude off on the density. (or the drive is way bigger than an aircraft carrier.)
So is the info in the forwarded Computerworld article. As this is a first gen HAMR [seagate.com] drive, the density is actually 1 terabit per square inch.
Oops in title - "sans" ? (Score:2)
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?
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Doesn't "sans" mean without?
Yes, that's because 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 it's last 4TB drive.
At least, I'm sure I read that somewhere.
My bad ... (Score:2)
Why not? (Score:3)
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.
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No. drives are *not* sealed. Making a sealed drive that won't implode if you, say, take it on an aircraft in your laptop, or to ship it to the client (for example) is non trivial.
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No. drives are *not* sealed. Making a sealed drive that won't implode if you, say, take it on an aircraft in your laptop, or to ship it to the client (for example) is non trivial.
By "ship", do you mean a submarine? Because otherwise my head in plode (considering a roughly sea-level internal pressure vs. the mile-high club)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Funny)
Fun Fact, retail helium for recreational used is often salvaged from used 'pure' helium from MRI machines and such.
So children's party balloons are filled with medical waste, yay!
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Fun Fact, retail helium for recreational used is often salvaged from used 'pure' helium from MRI machines and such.
So children's party balloons are filled with medical waste, yay!
I wondered where Big Bang Theory got most of their scripts for Sheldon. Now I know ... Slashdot!
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
actually, the drives aren't usually sealed. there's a porous frit plug that allows the pressure inside and outside to be equalized, and which has pores small enough not to let water vapor in.
Designing a hermetic container that lasts for years is non-trivial, particularly one to hold Helium, which has very, very small atoms that can go through the interstices in the metal. By comparison, pulling a vacuum would be easier, but disk drives need something to fly the heads on. He is nice because it is also very low viscosity
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He is nice because it is also very low viscosity
But she is nicer than him, that's for sure, mainly because her viscosity is spot on.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
.......
Designing a hermetic container that lasts for years is non-trivial, particularly one to hold Helium, which has very, very small atoms that can go through the interstices in the metal. .....
This is important.....
I have seen thick wall steel pipe with blisters inside the metal.
The pipe contained high pressure hydrogen at high temperatures and
the hydrogen would react with the carbon in the steel and grow bubbles
a little like Swiss cheese.
The diffusion dimension of H2 and He is also interesting.
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Designing a hermetic container that lasts for years is non-trivial
Huh ? My cheap plastic watch is hermetic to 4 atm, and for years. Plenty of things are. And for a HD you don't have to stand more than 1/3 atm of pressure differential, something trivial. Having used hard drives at high altitude and seen them die quickly, I always wondered why they don't simply seal the damn things with air at 1 atm inside.
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So, when you pull a vacuum, does it eventually fill up with helium that goes through the interstices in the metal from the ambient atmospheric mix of gasses?
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Yes, at an incrediby slow pace, and only until you reach the same partial pressure of helium inside and outside the container. Which will give you a ridiculously small amount of helium after a huge wait. That's why no one does that.
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Helium is so good at leaking it is used to test for leaks using a mass spectrometer leak tester.
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Because they're trying to maintain their quality. [backblaze.com]
(Seriously, though, they actually don't seal their hard drives. Hard drives typically have a small hole in the casing with a extremely fine dust- and moisture-proof filter attached. It allows the drive to equalize its pressure with the environment and reduces the mechanical strain on the housing and seals.)
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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.
Ask the question differently..... why you would use helium.
A partial answer is thermal... revisit the old TCM (thermal conductive modules)
used in system components like IBM 3081. H has good thermal properties.
Another is the H or He have vastly better dynamic fluid properties to let the head seek
and perhaps fly better.
Pressure and seal is an issue but an expansion bladder can establish a way for
pressure changes to have minimum impact on the case.
Helium is inert allowing a wider choice of internal materials.
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it is just as easy and cheap to leave helium in the drive as some form of super clean air.
Have you ever wondered how Helium and Hydrogen filled balloons, even metal ones will deflate and fall despite no obvious signs of a leak? It is very difficult to properly seal either element into a permanent storage container. There's nothing cheap or easy about designing a case like that.
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Why not?
- Requires extra machinery/infrastructure to be installed at the HD plant
- Expense of buying helium
- Expense of other drive changes required to support helium (better sealing, etc)
- Expense of licensing existing patents on helium filled drives and their manufacture.
Or perhaps they're just busy validating new drive models and their assembly line, and they'll be shipping helium filled drives shortly...
Helium leak? (Score:5, Funny)
Finally a way to detect if your drive is about to crash: you start to sound like a munchkin.
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We won't know shit until Newegg begins to stock them, maybe in about 5 years. Cost data from manufacturers, even when you can get it, is always useless because in the real world nobody pays anywhere near list price.
Calculations (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [wolframalpha.com]
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The He-filled WD version is just a bit larger, and has a giant laser in the center that can blow up a city.
Re:Calculations (Score:5, Funny)
At 1000 bits per square inch, to get 6TB you need about a third the size of Manhattan.
It takes a couple of hours to get up to 5800RPM, but when that bitch is spinning don't even try to tilt your computer.
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Just think, last year's drives at 831 bits per square inch, that's only 29 bits per inch, squared... you can see those suckers with the naked eye.
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If I'm doing my math right here, that comes out to ~1,900km/s at the outter edges of the platter. That's about 0.6% of the speed of light.
Wolfram Math [wolframalpha.com] ...Divide by pi and sqrt to get radius, multiply by 2pi to get circumference, multiply by RPM, divide by 60 to get it in seconds... Correct?
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If I'm doing my math right here, that comes out to ~1,900km/s at the outter edges of the platter. That's about 0.6% of the speed of light.
Wolfram Math [wolframalpha.com] ...Divide by pi and sqrt to get radius, multiply by 2pi to get circumference, multiply by RPM, divide by 60 to get it in seconds... Correct?
So if it's a third the size of Manhattan at rest, how big is the outer edge at full speed?
"relying" on helium (Score:3, Informative)
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 [theregister.co.uk]). 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.
So with the Helium inside, is drive lighter? (Score:2)
In a big storage server, that could amount to few kilos, perhaps
Re:So with the Helium inside, is drive lighter? (Score:5, Funny)
In a big storage server, that could amount to few kilos, perhaps
Absolutely. That's astute! They're going for cloud storage.
Press blurb is junk (Score:3)
The press blurb is full of nonsense. Not one real performance statistic. Not one.
-Matt
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You ask for facts? These have been eliminated from marketing a long time ago, as they tend to get in the way. There are enough suckers that will buy this thing anyways, despite Seagates consistently bad reliability track record.
I'm surprised no one said, yet... (Score:1)
That's a lot of porn...
Get Perpendicular (Score:3)
Just in case anyone missed it, here's the very technical video explanation by Hitachi about how perpendicular recording works [youtube.com].
Don't buy Seagate drives... (Score:2)
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... [backblaze.com]
This one is unlike to be any better in that regard.
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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... [backblaze.com]
This one is unlike to be any better in that regard.
I swear, it seems if you can generate the right kind of FUD that seems to resonate with "storage nerds" biases, it will be keep being thrown around like that damn Wakefield vaccine paper. If I were building network storage (and yeah, I suppose I'm not Backblaze trying to do it on the super cheap), there's no way I would do something as stupid as go buy a bunch of external drives and rip the drives out and put them in server application. Try doing that with HGST, WD, Seagate or Toshiba branded products, and
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Nice attempt at diversion. What you say is complete BS though, and rather obviously so.
First, you always get bitten when doing storage. There is no way around that.
Second, "enterprise grade" disk hardware is a myth today. Backblaze recognized that and quite a few other people do it too. Sure, you can get things like lower vibration, but they do not matter to drive lifetime these days, only access time and that you can measure. Your argumentation relies on 20 year old tech and that is not being used in moder
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Keep kidding yourself. And yes, I have disassembled drives and I know what I am looking at with electronics. I also do understand accelerated aging for electronics and you do very obviously not. The relationship between temperature and failure rate is a simplistic model, that mostly held for old drives as ball-bearings in the spindles do follow it. Guess what, modern drives do not have them anymore and FDBs are a whole different story. There are a lot of other things to understand with heat-accelerated agin
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Google's report on drive failures said enterprise drives were no more reliable. I actually compared specs for a vendor's desktop and enterprise models of a disk. The only difference on paper was with the touted vibration handling circuitry, that I'm told is an extremely important feature you get with buying enterprise drives. It was optional in the enterprise drives and included in every desktop drive. Most shocking was when I tore apart a very expensive high-capacity Sun RAID array from 2005/2006. Sun
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Indeed. Good Seagate drive models are roughly on par with the average competitor drive. The problem is that they have so many bad ones and do not seem to care that they are pushing bad drives with significantly reduced reliability to their customers. And while other hdd manufacturers have had the occasional bad model as well, with Seagate it is a pattern and a quite frequent occurrence.
55TB / year? (Score:3)
Since when mechanical drives degrade during writes? Isn't that a SSD 's illness?
And 55TB / year for desktop drive sounds ridiculously low.
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Writes do slightly degrade HDDs. The extra heat shortens their lifespan, but the main issue is that they need idle time to check and re-write existing data.
When idle HDDs will do a background surface scan where they check the integrity of each block. All blocks will have some amount of errors that can be recovered using error correction codes. Once a block reaches a certain threshold of errors it is considered bad and the data is moved somewhere else. The drive has a supply of reserve blocks for this purpos
Unfortunately, Seagate's reliability is garbage (Score:5, Informative)
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True. Maxtor infected seagate, and their reliability is generally horrific.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ [backblaze.com]
25% of seagate drives die within 3 years. Its utterly horrific.
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Helium drives (Score:1)
Humidity sensor (Score:2)
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 proofread your posts. (Score:2)
> over it's last 4TB drive.
over its* last 4TB drive.
it's = it is
Learn this.
Nice for 3.5... (Score:2)
Now where are my 2Tb+ 2.5" hard drives?
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I dont, in 27 years I have had 1 seagate fail, and it was still under warranty, meanwhile every single WD I have ever bought has shit its shoes and hit the dumpster
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WD has a know problem is sulfur-rich environments (e.g. former east-bloc) as they use silver-plating instead of gold on their PCBs. Other than that they are perfectly fine. Seagate is by far the most flaky vendor with often good disks and often lemons.
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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.
Re:obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:obsolete (Score:5, Funny)
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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-
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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. Sh
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* 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 SA
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Believe it or not, capacity still matters.