Western Digital Launches "World's Biggest" HGST Ultrastar 12TB Helium Hard Drive

Megalith

Megalith

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12TB is a lot of data to keep in one place, but I would still be at peace even if I didn’t have backups, since HGST drives are pretty darn reliable. WD is now shipping the biggest helium Ultrastar yet, although there doesn’t seem to be any hint at pricing yet. I recently got my hands on a 6TB version and it’s working great, but it is hard for me to tell how quieter they are (one of the supposed benefits of helium).

This drive is built for reliability -- pretty much a given since it's an enterprise drive -- with a MTBF (mean time between failures) rated at 2.5 million hours. Compared to 8TB air-filled drives, HelioSeal hard drives provides 50 percent more capacity, uses 54 percent less power (Watts/TB), and offers 25 percent greater reliability. Ultrastar He12 comes with Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options and is available with either 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interfaces.
 
So I could plug 12 of these into my server and have a 130TB raid 5?
Would probably take over a week just to initialize or rebuild if I had a failure.:p
At this capacity, I'd be worried about a rebuild even with Raid 6.
 
James Robinson said:
*shudder* think of all the pron you could save.....
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Still not enough. I'll take 4.

Just imagine when one of these things fails though. It's going to take a looooong time to copy 12TB to the replacement drive.

westrock2000 said:
In before uppity URE advocates claim this drive is a probable impossibility.
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Yeah the thing about those UREs is most people reference the manufacturer's official numbers, which are VERY conservative so that they can't be blamed for problems. Sort of like the write endurance ratings on SSDs often being 1/10th (or even less) than the actual real-world endurance. That being said I still wouldn't feel very comfortable using these in RAID5 (even less comfortable with RAID5 than I already am)
 
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travbrad said:
Still not enough. I'll take 4.

Just imagine when one of these things fails though. It's going to take a looooong time to copy 12TB to the replacement drive.
Click to expand...

I bet it was worse collecting and consolidating off all those little 200-300gb drives onto a nice new 4Tb... LOL!
 
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