WD readies first 10TB HDD

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Oleg34

Limp Gawd
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Western Digital’s HGST unit announced on September 9 that the company has begun to ship a new version of its helium-filled disk drive, the Ultrastar He8—with 8-terabytes of data storage capacity. And the company has an even bigger capacity drive waiting in the wings. That drive, which uses a new magnetic recording technology, will have a capacity of 10 terabytes. http://arstechnica.com/information-...es-first-10tb-hard-drive-ships-new-8tb-drive/
 
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This is supposed to be for backups only since it will have a longer write process.
 
who cares this would be amazing for making backups... 10TB in a 3.5" disk... damn that's impressive

8 of them in a RAID6 could backup my 6x 12x 2TB drive RAID6 arrays... thats 72 drives down to 6...
 
We'll doubtlessly be getting some of those when they're available. I'll share the details when that happens. :)
 
I don't understand the use of Helium. It leaks, even through metal, so these drives cannot have a long lifespan, can they?
 
There is a hermetic seal that is supposed to prevent that. However I expect the drive to die quickly if the seal is broken somehow.
 
Quartz-1 said:
I don't understand the use of Helium. It leaks, even through metal, so these drives cannot have a long lifespan, can they?
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Helium is inert, it wont tunnel through metals like hydrogen does. If the seal is good enough it should be fine for the useful lifespan of the drive.
 
There is a pressure sensor in the He drives that will shut down the drive if there is a loss of pressure to preserve the data. The Shingled drives are really a stopgap measure for now until they get HAMR working properly and where they can mass produce reliably and at reasonable pricing.
 
drescherjm said:
There is a hermetic seal that is supposed to prevent that. However I expect the drive to die quickly if the seal is broken somehow.
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No seal is going to prevent the diffusion. Helium is not as bad as hydrogen, but the rate is still about two thirds if I remember correctly.
 
10 Tickle Bits :eek:. Oh brother I can hardly wait. However, unless it's HAMR, 5 platters or less, non-SMR, and non-helium I'll pass. I worry too much about what WD is doing on that front. With HAMR so close there's no point in being a beta tester for helium.
 
10TB HDDs will become the new tape drives (or worse). You've got more data to backup and handle on the same platter size, yet the read and write performance do not proportionally increase. Sooner or later, Very Large Hard Drives (VLHH), if not already, will be something used for slow performance archive & backup servers featuring at least two dozen of these (mostly for redundancy and fault tolerance in compensation to their enormous capacities).
 
Quartz-1 said:
I don't understand the use of Helium....
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This is pretty much in line with what Hitachi told me a few months ago:

Why does helium make a difference? Helium has only one-seventh the density of air. Replacing air with helium inside a hard drive dramatically reduces the turbulence caused by the spinning disk, cuts power consumption and results in a lower temperature within the disk drive.
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You can bet they'll be quite interested to see how Seagate 8+TB drives do.
 
Cerulean said:
10TB HDDs will become the new tape drives (or worse). You've got more data to backup and handle on the same platter size, yet the read and write performance do not proportionally increase. Sooner or later, Very Large Hard Drives (VLHH), if not already, will be something used for slow performance archive & backup servers featuring at least two dozen of these (mostly for redundancy and fault tolerance in compensation to their enormous capacities).
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In a way they are already doing that. WD more so than the other brands is not pushing HDD's as a main consumer drive anymore.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1340

Factor into that the Red, Purple, and Green drives that make up the bulk of their drives. They are mediocre when used outside the intended purpose and even then don't really excel at that.

Its been a long time since I've seen them really market Black drives anymore. Even the Blue line has been all but cancelled at this point.
 
Cerulean said:
10TB HDDs will become the new tape drives (or worse). You've got more data to backup and handle on the same platter size, yet the read and write performance do not proportionally increase. Sooner or later, Very Large Hard Drives (VLHH), if not already, will be something used for slow performance archive & backup servers featuring at least two dozen of these (mostly for redundancy and fault tolerance in compensation to their enormous capacities).
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again, where is the problem? companies like storing a lot of versions of stuff, like databases, that adds up very quickly... backup speed is not that critical, since you can archive to a fast array then dump to the slow arrays or whatnot... the fact that a 3.5" drive holds 10TB is awesome... almost as exciting as when the 1TB drives came out except more expensive lol
 
FLECOM said:
again, where is the problem? companies like storing a lot of versions of stuff, like databases, that adds up very quickly... backup speed is not that critical, since you can archive to a fast array then dump to the slow arrays or whatnot... the fact that a 3.5" drive holds 10TB is awesome... almost as exciting as when the 1TB drives came out except more expensive lol
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I just hope the reliability of the actual drive holds up to a value high enough to justify having 10TB of data on a single drive. That's a lot of data to lose. If they somehow compensated by making the drive far more reliable than the majority of mechanical drives on the market, then sure ...

But I suppose if you are using it for archiving, you already have an advantage. Perhaps these drives do not need to spin as fast, because, after all, it's not meant for performance but rather specially designed for longevity and reliability.
 
ya these are 100% archive drives, and that's great, archiving doesn't really need speed, tapes are not exactly fast either "maximum" speed of LTO-6 is 160MB/s (and realistically you won't see anything near that, and seek, oh boy)

a lot more things are requiring long term archives...

and hell even for people here, having one of these should work fine to store very static data like linux isos, feature length home movies etc
 
Liger88 said:
Its been a long time since I've seen them really market Black drives anymore. Even the Blue line has been all but cancelled at this point.
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Consumer storage requirements are shrinking as people are relying more and more on online storage. With that said I think wd will keep their specific, green, red, purple drives for a long time.
 
Trimlock said:
Consumer storage requirements are shrinking as people are relying more and more on online storage. With that said I think wd will keep their specific, green, red, purple drives for a long time.
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You forgot Enterprise. Smart people buy Enterprise HDDs for consumer use. :D
 
drescherjm said:
This is supposed to be for backups only since it will have a longer write process.
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To me a longer write process isn't suitable to backups, backups should be fast. But depending on how you use shingle drives they can be fast. If you do alternate backups (one week drives A, the other week drives B, for example) then you could format the drive before each use and then get full speed. Or do incremental backups until full then continue on the next drive, or format and start again, etc. You just need a scenario without random writes and without deleting files then writing in the freed space.

Since I use ZFS on my server and my backup server, I don't think shingle drives will work for me.
 
Cerulean said:
Imagine how long a Full Format would take on a 10TB drive
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Or wiping data. At this point it would make rewriting drives even just with all zeros nearly unfeasible and easier to just punch holes in it and throw it away.
 
Cerulean said:
Imagine how long a Full Format would take on a 10TB drive
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Full formats aren't necessary in my scenario. I still usually do one when the drive is new as a first test, so I'd say in the region of 20 hours.
 
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