Toshiba Unveils World's First FC-MAMR HDD: 18 TB, Helium Filled (anandtech.com) 147
Toshiba this week announced the industry's first hard drive featuring flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. The new MG09-series HDDs are designed primarily for nearline and enterprise applications, they offer an 18 TB capacity along with an ultra-low idle power consumption. From a report: The Toshiba MG09-series 3.5-inch 18 TB HDD are based on the company's 3rd generation nine-platter helium sealed platform that features 18 heads with a microwave-emitting component which changes magnetic coercivity of the platters before writing data. The HD disks are made by Showa Denko K.K. (SDK), a long-time partner of Toshiba. Each aluminum platter is about 0.635 mm thick, it features an areal density of around 1.5 Tb/inch2 and can store up to 2 TB of data. The MG09 family also includes a 16 TB model which presumably features a lower number of platters (based on the same performance rating).
For modern enterprise and nearline 3.5-inch HDDs, Toshiba's MG09-series drives uses a motor with a 7200-RPM spindle speed. The HDDs are also equipped with a 512 MB buffer and are rated for a 281 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate. Unfortunately, Toshiba has not updated the random access performance of the new products, though it is likely that their per-TB IOPS performance is lower when compared to predecessors. The manufacturer will offer its new drives both with SATA 3.3 (6 Gbps) and SAS 3.0 (12 Gbps) interfaces as well as a selection of logical data block length.
One of the noteworthy things about Toshiba's MG09-series FC-MAMR HDDs is their power consumption. In active idle mode, they typically consume 4.16/4.54 Watts (SATA/SAS models), which is considerably lower when compared with Seagate's Exos X18 as well as Western Digital's Ultrastar DC HC550. As far as power consumption efficiency at idle (large hard drives could spend plenty of time idling) is concerned, the 18 TB MG09 is an undeniable champion consuming just 0.23 Watts per TB (in case of the SATA version). Meanwhile, the new drives are rated for 8.35/8.74 Watts (SATA/SAS SKUs) during read/write operations, which is higher when compared to the DC HC550 as well as predecessors from the MG07 and the MG08-series.
For modern enterprise and nearline 3.5-inch HDDs, Toshiba's MG09-series drives uses a motor with a 7200-RPM spindle speed. The HDDs are also equipped with a 512 MB buffer and are rated for a 281 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate. Unfortunately, Toshiba has not updated the random access performance of the new products, though it is likely that their per-TB IOPS performance is lower when compared to predecessors. The manufacturer will offer its new drives both with SATA 3.3 (6 Gbps) and SAS 3.0 (12 Gbps) interfaces as well as a selection of logical data block length.
One of the noteworthy things about Toshiba's MG09-series FC-MAMR HDDs is their power consumption. In active idle mode, they typically consume 4.16/4.54 Watts (SATA/SAS models), which is considerably lower when compared with Seagate's Exos X18 as well as Western Digital's Ultrastar DC HC550. As far as power consumption efficiency at idle (large hard drives could spend plenty of time idling) is concerned, the 18 TB MG09 is an undeniable champion consuming just 0.23 Watts per TB (in case of the SATA version). Meanwhile, the new drives are rated for 8.35/8.74 Watts (SATA/SAS SKUs) during read/write operations, which is higher when compared to the DC HC550 as well as predecessors from the MG07 and the MG08-series.
There's a helium shortage, you know. (Score:2)
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And how much would that cost? The universe is full of helium, that doesn't mean it is cheap or even feasible to go get it.
The world is full of jokes, too, but apparently those are also hard to get.
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*points at vacuum cleaner*
*points at rocket*
*points at Jupiter*
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*points at vacuum cleaner*
*points at rocket*
*points at Jupiter*
It's a rocket! It's a vacuum cleaner! No, it's.... MEGAMAID!
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And how much would that cost?
Free of charge!
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Local pickup only
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25 years in the future, cold fusion reactors will provide plenty of helium
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Balloon clowns can switch to hydrogen. It can really add a bang to a birthday party.
Serious, humor-destroying answer: balloon clowns are mostly using a pump to inflate long balloons with air so they can twist them into funny shapes...
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Oh, the humanity!
HONK HONK!
Re: There's a helium shortage, you know. (Score:2)
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https://www.gazprom.com/projec... [gazprom.com]
This is being built as part of the Russia-China Power of Siberia pipeline infrastructure.
It will produce 60 million cubic meters of helium once its fully operational.
First production should start in a year.
Re: There's a helium shortage, you know. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep. The biggest source of helium is in natural gas deposits. Second biggest source is trapped in uranium and thorium ore. Nearly all the helium in the crust comes from radioactive decay. New, large deposits were just found in 2015 and 2016 in the Rockies while searching for more natural gas. "Deposits" is a perfectly cromulent word for helium.
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18TB. That's a lot of porn.
I'll take two.
With those disk sizes, you need at least three to do a 1main +2 disk mirror.
Or, you can go raid 6 with anything from 5~12 depending on your needs.
Lest you lose all that sweet porn of yours.
Oh, and do not forget to back up too.
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With those disk sizes, you need at least three to do a 1main +2 disk mirror.
So... That's a kind of threesome? :3
Or, you can go raid 6 with anything from 5~12 depending on your needs.
Oooh baby, now you're talking to me...
Two concerns (Score:5, Interesting)
First: Watts per TB at idle. Does this metric make any sense? Idle power of HDDs seems to be independent of their capacity.
Second: There is no indication or estimation of price. SSDs are typically 4x more expensive per GB (capacity), although they are much better for IOPS. The price of storage has stagnated lately, see for example this plot [jcmit.net]. Will they continue decreasing the price per GB(typically by providing larger units, as it is the case) or will it remain similar?
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First: Watts per TB at idle. Does this metric make any sense?
It's relevant if you have shedloads of disk online. Most storage probably sits idle most of the time, so that's the power state you're most concerned with.
Second: There is no indication or estimation of price.
Hide yo wallet
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Sure it makes sense. If I am using 18 drives each of 1 TB or one drive that's 18 TB and each drive is using the same amount of energy it should become obvious which is more efficient for long-term storage.
Re: Two concerns (Score:2)
You're not a private user like OP though. Unless you're triuy a fan of lossless 4K 3h knee-deep triple anal footing session porn or something. ;)
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Anal footing? Eww, that's nasty, especially without an enema first.
Nope, but I have been in million square foot data centers where the cooling budget alone was larger than the electrical usage of entire towns. Still surprises me in these days where cloud computing brings in so much money that suppliers can't spend it all that this needs to be spelled out for some supposed "nerds". Makes me wonder if some of the lower-UID accounts haven't been taken over by their grandkids.
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It all depends on your use for the drives. If it's nearline storage then idle watts is very important since most of the time the disk will be idle. If it's online storage getting hammered 24/7 then maybe you won't be buying this type of drive anyway, it's not really designed for that kind of use.
For nearline and offline storage price per GB is far more important than the kind of performance gains seen with SSDs. They typically get large chunks of data written to them serially. They are the kind of thing use
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" Idle power of HDDs seems to be independent of their capacity."
In any one family, you get different capacities by adding platters and heads. So the power consumption when the spindle is not rotating is made up of a fixed amount for the board, and a variable amount for each head and tranceiver.
The complainers here (Score:3, Funny)
Jesus Christ the amount of complainers on the site never ends. You can tell the audience here has aged out of technology and moved onto the old man phase where everything they don't understand is new and scary. Massive hard drives using helium inside? Years ago people would be excited about the idea. Tesla is the perfect example. An electric car that runs Linux under the hood? Oh not on slashdot, people here absolutely hate Tesla for some reason. Bitcoin is another good one. Amazing technology written by an anonymous person that is making headlines daily. But on slashdot its the tired smug comments about tulips on every single story like clockwork. Maybe the mods should post some new stories about breakthroughs in Metamucil and bifocal lenses to appease the elderly readers.
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Massive hard drives using helium inside? Years ago people would be excited about the idea.
But then we got jaded by the years of new technological developments and announcements that we were excited by and which turned out to suck, or to be vaporware.
Tesla is the perfect example. An electric car that runs Linux under the hood?
It doesn't. It runs Linux on the dash.
Oh not on slashdot, people here absolutely hate Tesla for some reason.
There are at least as many Tesla fans here as detractors.
Personally, I'm a Musk detractor [exposedbycmd.org]. I have nothing in particular against Tesla itself for its own sake, although they have made some truly embarrassing design SNAFUs.
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But then we got jaded by the years of new technological developments and announcements that we were excited by and which turned out to suck, or to be vaporware.
But slightly bigger hard drives every year haven't proven to be vapourware.
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But slightly bigger hard drives every year haven't proven to be vapourware.
No, but some of them have sucked, with poor write speeds. This doesn't matter so much when they are in a massive RAID, but it matters a lot in most other cases.
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But slightly bigger hard drives every year haven't proven to be vapourware.
Must we really be over-the-moon excited that toshiba took a 16 TB HD and found a way to add yet another platter in the drive?
That's a little more exciting than the razor company that found a way to put six blades on their new razor, one more than last years five blade razor...
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Oh not on slashdot, people here absolutely hate Tesla for some reason.
Personally, I'm a Musk detractor [exposedbycmd.org].
Fuck me that's a quality non-partisan headline on that page you linked to.
Let's deconstruct it, shall we: "elon-musks-spacex-gave-119000-to-congress-members-who-voted-to-overturn-the-presidential-election".
I'll start by asking When did this donation occur?, to which the answer is during the 2019/2020 period. But wait, didn't the event mentioned in the headline occur in 2021? Why, yes it did. I don't think even Elon has claimed to have the gift of prophecy.
Ok, but even so $119,000 is a lot of money. Sure, bu
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More annoying to me is the plethora of 7-digit IDs who have no clue why a site that bills itself as "News for nerds, stuff that matters" runs stories on genetically altering sweet potatoes, supplying shelters with power from a locomotive, or the theft of a million pounds of maple syrup. I personally think Bitcoin is one of the dumbest ideas ever thought up by a CIA contractor (and that's saying a LOT), but I'm not shaking my fist at the sky because I can't find a machine that will read my floppy with Fligh
Helium containment (Score:2)
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There'd better not be, 7200 RPM drives can build up a lot of heat fast.
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These days there are coatings that will contain helium for a long time. They aren't free, but they do work.
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I wonder the same. Helium can be a pain to keep in one place for years on end (of course depending upon wall thickness and pressure). I'm curious why they chose He in the first place. Argon is easier to handle, nearly as inert, and abundant.
That said, I'm sure they've thought about it and there's a good reason why they don't go with Ar.
Re:Helium containment (Score:5, Informative)
Argon is easier to handle, nearly as inert, and abundant.
It's not about it being inert. It's about density. Lower density gases provide less air resistance while also providing better heat conduction. The heat conduction thing may seem counterintuitive, but argon, being a denser gas, is actually a better insulator than nitrogen and oxygen, which are also better insulators than helium. So, basically, a helium filled drive spins with less resistance than one filled with argon or regular air and the internal components stay cooler. Hydrogen would be even better in that regard, but it's even harder to contain and hydrogen infiltration also makes metals brittle, etc.
If eliminating heat is not an issue, then a vacuum would theoretically work best for avoiding air resistance, but traditionally aerodynamic effects are used to avoid head crashes as well. I don't know if that's still a consideration in these drives, but I imagine it still is, so a vacuum probably won't work. So, all these factors leave filling with helium at normal air pressure as probably the best option.
It is possible that some of these factors have changed in hard drive design. So any other information anyone has is appreciated.
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If eliminating heat is not an issue, then a vacuum would theoretically work best for avoiding air resistance, but traditionally aerodynamic effects are used to avoid head crashes as well. I don't know if that's still a consideration in these drives, but I imagine it still is, so a vacuum probably won't work. So, all these factors leave filling with helium at normal air pressure as probably the best option.
It is possible that some of these factors have changed in hard drive design. So any other information anyone has is appreciated.
Don't the drive heads "float" on an air cushion induced by the turbulence from the spinning drive? That's why drive heads crash if the drive spins down before they are parked safely. I think that would rule out a vacuum drive as well, heat issues not withstanding. I could be misremembering though.
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Absolutely correct.
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Does 'ideal gas law' mean anything to you?
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Where is the MC-HAMR drive? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But how many (Score:2)
How many Libraries of Congress can it hold?
Concern about helium leakage (Score:2)
As far as I know helium is very difficult to contain and e.g. has to be refilled in MRIs on regular basis, so if it's vital for this HDD to function they might have a limited lifetime.
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It's a mechanical drive - it already has a limited lifetime due to it's reliance on moving parts.
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MRIS are refilled because the liquid helium is a consumable coolant which is designed to evaporate. Different mechanism than the gas permeability of steel or aluminum.
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Modern superconducting MRI scanners recondense their helium as it boils off. They still lose some though, and have to be topped off occasionally.
ZFS (Score:2)
"Helium filled" (Score:2)
Every drive comes with a free tether! Now your data can truly be in the cloud!
Not the first: helium disks in the 1960s/70s (Score:2)
Digital Development Corp. of San Diego built head-per-track disks in the 1960s-/70s that operated in a helium atmosphere. The enclosure was a metal can bolted to an aluminum baseplate, with a sealing gasket. A small gas cylinder and regulator were attached to the baseplate (19" rack mount), and a couple of valves kept the interior pressure to slightly above ambient. If I recall correctly, DDC stenciled their own part number onto the cylinder, though it was industry standard (e.g. Matheson).
I had picked
how much? (Score:2)
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Wouldn't it make more sense to invest into the ssd technology at this point?
It is possible to do more than one thing at a time, especially when the two things use different people with different expertise and skills.
SSDs are great when you want to do lots of small, random I/O. HDDs are good when you want many TBs of cheap reliable storage.
We need both.
wasting at the same time precious helium?
They could manufacture these disks for a thousand years with the helium used in one blimp.
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They could manufacture these disks for a thousand years with the helium used in one blimp.
Actually no. The helium used in MRI machines and the like, and also HDDs, is very pure. After a while, the helium used in these applications is contaminated with air. At that point, it is used for things such as blimps and party ballons... sadly, unlike a big machine like an MRI, the helium in HDDs is not economicaly viable to recover.
Having said that, there is plenty of helium in oil wells and the like. If (as someone else said in this thread) in 25 years the fusion reactors are not producing suficient Hel
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Helium is pretty easy to purify.
The helium in MRI machines boils off and is captured and condensed if possible, vented to atmosphere if not. You don't collect it to use in blimps.
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Uh, not more than a need to re-train an entire planet on the value of a damn delete button.
Refusing to allow a deceased family member to be a victim of odd identity theft (or counted as a future voter), I volunteered to "inherit" every hard drive.
What is it you're doing with al these drives you inherited? What's stopping you from hitting the delete button for your dead family members? Not sure why wiping a couple of dozen drives is such an onerous burden for you.
I can guess family photos and video's lots of important documents that need saving. With that many drives probably duplicates and backups and likely a porn stash
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Uh, not more than a need to re-train an entire planet on the value of a damn delete button.
Refusing to allow a deceased family member to be a victim of odd identity theft (or counted as a future voter), I volunteered to "inherit" every hard drive.
What is it you're doing with al these drives you inherited? What's stopping you from hitting the delete button for your dead family members? Not sure why wiping a couple of dozen drives is such an onerous burden for you.
Because said family member happened to be a photographer. Are you really that uncaring about data that could be passed on to future generations?
First no one can find the electronic garbage can, and then when you show it to them, they're wanting to say "fuck it" and upgrade to a nuke. I can feel the love.
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Yes all storage use cases are your family's hard drives. So what you are saying is, since your little pea brain can't find a use case for it, one must not exist!
My comment was more directed towards data hoarders, in all forms. Ever wonder just how long we're going to keep every single YouTube video? Every dead persons social media content, amounting to billions of them? We're just gonna keep adding and adding and never delete anything? Wonder how long those services will be "free" as they're forced to maintain data stores with retention times defined as "infinite". Facebook would probably argue it's some kind of crime against humanity to shut them down if they
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Given drive space is ever-increasing. Do we NEED to delete dead-people's content? It should at the least quit growing when they die.
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People continue to develop SSD technology, but it's not currently a replacement for HDDs in the target application here. An 18 TB HDD starts at $440. An 8 TB SSD with basically the same TBW rating (but only a three-year vs five-year warranty) starts at $842. The HDD is 4.3 times as much storage per dollar. That it's not still even more is a reflection of how much SSD R&D goes on.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
HDDs are cheaper, but also more reliable for long-term storage. You can put an HDD on the shelf for five years, and then spin it up and retrieve your data. That may not work with an SSD. The SSD is even more likely to lose data if it is in a hot datacenter.
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HDDs are cheaper, but also more reliable for long-term storage. You can put an HDD on the shelf for five years, and then spin it up and retrieve your data. That may not work with an SSD.
It may not work with a HDD, either. You might try to spin it up and find you have stiction. And this ain't the olden days where you could open up the disk without even a glove box let alone a clean room, manually turn the spindle to free it, and then close it back up... which I did once with a 40MB Seizegate RLL disk, and got all my data off of it with no errors.
Re: What's the point? (Score:2)
Actually, unless they are undet a specis athmosphere, like this one, you still can. If you only want to rescue the data, one time opening it up won't cause any relevant dataloss due to dirt Especially with multiple tries.
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HDDs are cheaper, but also more reliable for long-term storage. You can put an HDD on the shelf for five years, and then spin it up and retrieve your data. That may not work with an SSD.
It may not work with a HDD, either. You might try to spin it up and find you have stiction. And this ain't the olden days where you could open up the disk without even a glove box let alone a clean room, manually turn the spindle to free it, and then close it back up... which I did once with a 40MB Seizegate RLL disk, and got all my data off of it with no errors.
Welcome to the late 90's. when you turn of the drive, the heads park on plastic ramps.
the problem nowadays is not stiction anymore. Is the fluid bearings in the spindle motor dying on you while stored on the shelf.
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I would bet that a SSD would be unreadable in a decade, but I wouldn't bet that a HDD would be readable.
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I would bet that a SSD would be unreadable in a decade, but I wouldn't bet that a HDD would be readable.
If your argument here is interface, both are using pretty much the same standards today (assuming SATA)
And I can still buy USB floppy disk drives in the year 2021 (Yeah, that funny looking "Save" button thing that holds a whopping 1.44MB), and buy HDD docking stations that use ribbon cables. I seriously doubt we'll make SATA extinct anytime soon.
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I think tape would still be more relevant than disks for long-term backup purposes... Too bad it became so expensive.
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Meanwhile in the real world, Tesla has sold about 300K units in their history, and Toyota sells around 800K units a month.
In the real world, Tesla sold about 500K units last year. [tesla.com]
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Would you also drop research into magnetic tape and optical media?
They're working on hard drives because they form a seriously useful function for many users, not everyone has the same use case for data storage. These guys for example:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aero... [ieee.org]
On four nights in April 2017, everything had to come together. Seven giant telescopes (some of them multidish arrays) pointed at the same minuscule point in the sky. Seven maser clocks locked into sync. A half ton of helium-filled, 6- to 8-ter
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I bet the transfer rate of this shipping was absurdly high
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"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andy Tanenbaum
They essentially built their own version of the AWS Snowmobile (without my security design).
And the point is? Beyond your grasp... (Score:2)
Wouldn't it make more sense to invest into the ssd technology at this point?
Making cheaper and bigger ssd disks should be the priority, why keep investing researching a technology that is far slower wasting at the same time precious helium?
If I were Toshiba I would drop HDDs completely and focus my research efforts to try to increase the size and lower the prices of current SSDs.
Toshiba owns ~40% of Kioxia. Kioxia was formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corporation. Toshiba invented Flash memory.
Kioxia owns 50% of the Kioxia-Sandisk joint venture. So, toshiba owns 20% of that venture.
Six days ago, Kioxia-Sandisk released 162 Layer NAND Flash...
https://blocksandfiles.com/202... [blocksandfiles.com]
I would say that Toshiba has their ass well covered in the SSD/NVMe/persistent memory/Flash game.
And having your storage eggs in more than one basket seems like a good strategic bet for the time being.
Same bet We
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Because spinning rust still beats the pants off of SSD in price/capacity for larger drives and probably will for a good while.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, let's deplete the rare earth minerals that SSD's need instead.
SSDs don't use any rare earth minerals.
Also, "rare earth" metals are not rare and are in no danger of being depleted.
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Re: What's the point? (Score:2)
Who came up with calling so many different things oils anyway? Or fats or waxes.
At least chemistry has stopped calling everything "salts" or "essences" or "ethers", and spices aren's all called somethingsomething pepper anymore. :)
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Be like astronomers. You've got hydrogen, and you've got metals.
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Rare earth minerals and essential oils - two things with unfortunate and deceptive names.
Very true. Rare earths are primarily "rare" because apparently they 1) are hard to find in concentrated amounts (as opposed to being physically scarce overall), 2) are a super-duper-pain-in-the-ass to extract and process out, physically and chemically and 3) the processing of them produces all kinds of extremely unpleasant byproducts including some radioactive ones. So the mining, extraction and processing of them tends to happen in areas where environmental controls are....more lax (*cough*China*cough*)
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Re:"ultra-low idle power consumption" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"ultra-low idle power consumption" (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm currently running 14 x 5Tb 2.5" HDD's so yes, lower power = good. Give me low power 5 x 18Tb drives at a good price point so I can get the same capacity and I'll consider changing my backplane.
Well, that's certainly one way to demonstrate the priority of 0.001% of the user base.
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7,700,000,000 * 48% of people who are computer users * 0.001% = 3,696,000 likely customers. Considering that many of those work for places like AWS, Azure, NYSE, the Fed, and the like that's certainly worth developing for.
Re: "ultra-low idle power consumption" (Score:2)
Who does that tough?
Ok, for data centers that always makes sense.
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This is enterprise market, and the drives are presumably made to work in datacenters.
Cooling requirements means that you pay both the electricity you consume (and transform to heat) and the electricity for air conditioning.
With the ryse of high electrical power servers (lots of cores or high energy consumption cores), datacenters are in many cases cooling limited or electricity supply limited - so low idle power hard drives do help a bit with that.
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I'm not sure if you've been living under a rock, but aside from bitcoin mining the tech industry is very concerned about low-power. Especially for continuous operation activities like providing large attached storage.
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I'm not sure if you've been living under a rock, but aside from bitcoin mining the tech industry is very concerned about low-power.
Interesting story.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Intels chips have quadrupled in power consumption over the past 4 years.
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Toshiba sells mainly enterprise drives so yeah if your array has a few hundred inside then lower power consumption is win for everyone.
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Imagine a datacenter full of these in a bunch of 4u60 or 4u102 enclosures; that's probably the biggest use case they're targeting with an 18TB drive. Some quick math:
42RU / 4RU per unit = 8 (which is 32RU, plus 3RU for switching, leaving 7RU for compute/controller nodes).
8*102 = 816 drives. If those drives are 11W/ea, that's 8,976W. If they can drop them to 9W/ea, that's 7,344W. So, saving 1,632W per rack becomes a pretty big deal over the life of the rack (think cost of power plus cost of cooling in a
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Re: On the heels of Macs shredding their SSDs... (Score:2)
For HDDs, it doesn't wear out for a loong time, uwhile for SSDs, it's a real concern, and it seems to get the price down, manufactureres will keep it that way. Next up: virtual-shingled hexagesimal level cells that are always read in three ways at the same time, because one way always gives back the wrong value... or something like that. ;)
Re:What?!! (Score:5, Interesting)
What the hell am I going to do with 18TB? That's more storage than any sane person ever needs.
Really? I mean I've been doing a bit of filming recently, I got a nice entry level mirrorless camera, which can do 4k/30 (I film in 4k/25) and even so it eats 64GiB memory cards for breakfast. Typically I do a bunch of filming, copying the cards as I go. I can rack up quite a lot of data in one day. Add in stock footage and other assets, it's quite a lot. Then of course the renderings of the final videos and the large amount of cache the video editor uses caching intermediate renderings.
Now a bunch of it us useless retakes, but it takes quite a while to sort through, so the last order of the day is then to run my backup script (based on borg) which takes a complete copy of all of the data, and then I upload it overnight to the cloud for safe keeping.
NGL, this is not efficient. Probably about 80% of the video files are junk, and of the remaining, maybe 50% is lead in and lead out so junk footage too. But to realize that efficiency, I'd need to sort through all the footage before backing up, i.e. a full editing pass. That takes ages, so I'd have a long window of un-backed-up data, which I feel is unwise. And for further efficiency, I could cut the junk out of the videos and re-encode them.
But that's a real break to my workflow, and I'd pay a lot in terms of my time and effort. Instead I can buy a big ass-drive (I have a 12TB one) and just not worry about it.
So do I need it? No. Am I insane? Well, I've traded a small amount of my money for a lot of my time and effort, which I would argue is a pretty rational transaction.
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I don't think drives like this target the average computer user. They target data warehouses and big data technologies, which seem to be an ever expanding field.
Granted, there are use cases where a normal user would want that much storage. Video and audio production comes to mind.
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Re: (Score:2)
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What the hell am I going to do with 18TB?
Store 1000 movies @ 4K...
The one thing I am certain of is that buying a single one of these drives is foolish.
The odds of a failure when trying to copy/mirror a spinning drive of this size is more than large enough to give a person a well reasoned pause, and going RAID doesnt make it better, it makes it worse. To be quite clear, if this drive gets 200MB/s sustained read speeds (it wont) then it would still take over 24 hours to read or verify. More likely this sucker will sustain something like 80MB/s
Re: What?!! (Score:2)
Which one? We'll need a day and hour. ;)