7TB drives on the way!

Richard Dower

Bleedin éll!......:eek:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/WD-We-Will-Ship-Helium-Filled-Sealed-HDDs-This-Year-371205.shtml

Normally, hard disk drive units have four platters inside them and, in rare cases, five, but Western Digital has come up with a way to incorporate seven inside a single storage unit.

Technically, seven platters fit well enough inside a hard drive. The problem lies in warping when spinning at high rates, and the friction that the air subjects the platter to.

That is why WD has decided to replace the air with helium. Sure, it means it will have to perfectly seal the HDDs against the outside world, but that's a minor sacrifice when a 3.5-inch HDD can suddenly pack a capacity of 7 TB.

This should remove the pressure that researchers have been feeling lately, as they were forced to step up their efforts to increase the areal density of said platters.

Lower platter friction is actually a secondary benefit in all this too. The real advantage lies in the reduced fluid flow forces buffeting the arms that position the heads over the data tracks. That's why the disks can be placed closer together.

Lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction don't hurt either. They make the units cooler and more silent.

“We are currently sampling these products with selected customers right now,” said Stephen D. Milligan, chief executive officer of Western Digital, during the latest conference call with financial analysts.

“We continue to expect that we will have units shipped and revenue realized before the end of the calendar year. The first generation product will not be a particularly significant volume product to start out with as customers test it out and that sort of thing.”

HGST (formerly known as Hitachi) will be the division tasked with shipping helium-filled seven-platter hard disk drives this year (2013). Right now, only samples are being shipped, and even the first wave of actual units will be more geared towards testing, but it's a definite step forward.

Overall, the new sealed HDDs will have 45% better watts-per-TB rating, and 23% less energy need.

Overheal

I can see a He drive being a lot more failure prone

Cabaal

Hitachi, err didn't they buy up IBM's harddrive business.
The same IBM that made those wonderful Deathstars (deskstars),

Had 4 of those deskstars and every single one of them failed big time

wheresmybeaver

Just as many of us move to cloud storage!

but of course it'll be great for those of us compulsively collecting HD material. I'm looking to replace an old 4-bay NAS but it looks like a 2-bay setup will be grand for the future with these new drives.

excollier

They're gonna sound very high pitched.............

Duggy747

I'd be incredibly skeptical of trusting the longevity of those drives.

BloodBath

I wouldn't fancy losing 7tb of data with a drive failure either. I'd sooner have multiple smaller drives.

downwithpeace

After some long consumer testing I would risk it but for now no.

practice

BloodBath wrote: »

I wouldn't fancy losing 7tb of data with a drive failure either. I'd sooner have multiple smaller drives.

I have nightmares over losing 2tb and 3 tb drives. I have backups of my backups and still worry.
7TB no thanks.

excollier

Remember when they said (and I paraphrase here) "...no-one will ever need more than 1.44MB..."

BloodBath

BloodBath wrote: »

I wouldn't fancy losing 7tb of data with a drive failure either. I'd sooner have multiple smaller drives.

practice wrote: »

I have nightmares over losing 2tb and 3 tb drives. I have backups of my backups and still worry.
7TB no thanks.

People say this at every storage milestone.

When 100MB drives were launched, someone said "imagine losing 100MB all in one go! - no way, i'll stick with my 50MB disks thank you very much".

BloodBath

It's nothing to do with the storage and everything to do with the tech. HDD's are an antiquated technology that will be dead within 10 years.

SSD's are far superior. Size and price is the problem but it gets better every year as well as massively increasing in performance unlike hdd's.

High end ssd's are already being limited by a relatively new sata3 connection. Hdd's don't even get close to maxing sata2, the majority won't even max sata1.

How fast do you think a 7 disk platter is going to be?

excollier

BloodBath wrote: »

It's nothing to do with the storage and everything to do with the tech. HDD's are an antiquated technology that will be dead within 10 years.

Should see out my time using computers then!

T-K-O

BloodBath wrote: »

It's nothing to do with the storage and everything to do with the tech. HDD's are an antiquated technology that will be dead within 10 years.

SSD's are far superior. Size and price is the problem but it gets better every year as well as massively increasing in performance unlike hdd's.

High end ssd's are already being limited by a relatively new sata3 connection. Hdd's don't even get close to maxing sata2, the majority won't even max sata1.

How fast do you think a 7 disk platter is going to be?

7 times faster?

BloodBath

BloodBath wrote: »

It's nothing to do with the storage and everything to do with the tech. HDD's are an antiquated technology that will be dead within 10 years.

SSD's are far superior. Size and price is the problem but it gets better every year as well as massively increasing in performance unlike hdd's.

High end ssd's are already being limited by a relatively new sata3 connection. Hdd's don't even get close to maxing sata2, the majority won't even max sata1.

How fast do you think a 7 disk platter is going to be?

Tape is even older than HDD and is very much alive.

The fact is that there are different usage scenarios in the real world - requiring different combinations of performance, capacity and longevity.

As long as HDD offers better price per GB than SSD it will not be "dead" because there will always be people/companies who need to store large amounts of active data as economically as possible, with performance a very secondary concern.

It is indeed possible that SSD will someday achieve equal or better price per GB than HDD but looking at historical trends I think it is very unlikely that will happen in 10 years.

BloodBath

That's true enough but as far as main stream storage go's I think it's fair enough to say it's on it's last legs.

You can get 1tb ssd's for €600 now with around 5 times the sequential read/write speeds of hdds and about 1000 times the random read/write performance of a hdd.

That's still very expensive at about 10 times the price of an equivalent 1tb hdd but it's coming down every year and considering the massive performance gains it's not just about price per gigabyte.