Western Digital Ships 12 TB WD Gold HDD: 8 Platters and Helium
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
Speaking of which.. what is a good hard drive that is above 1tb that is extra loud? I want my kids to grow up with a loud hard drive just like I did....
I put them in a Fractal Design R5 silent case. :)
It's a home NAS but I figure I can shut it down to replace a drive. No need for drive bays, neat as they are.
I remember listening to the sounds of the audio tape drive loading games in my 8bit 64kbyte RAM home computer. I don't wish my kids will ever have to go through that :)
Not mechanical, of course, but I'll never forget that dreary Winnipeg bus ride to pick one up.
Helium will leak so that is an extra problem to deal with in preserving data.
Regular HDDs, replace a controller or even open up old HDDs and run them open in a clean room no problem.
Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of a standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside).
While this would probably be true for almost any other gas, Helium is devilishly small and can permeate through the metal over time. [0]
[0] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-filled-10tb-harddri...
Do all 3 HDD manufacturers experiment with helium filled HDDs?
Or have one or the other found a different method to innovate? (prefer HDDs that have MTTF of 7+ years)
None. The He will leak and eventually positioning errors will become frequent if the drive stays in service long enough. It is not economically feasible to prevent the He diffusion. The drives are designed to lose He slowly enough to exceed their useful service life.
The process was developed by HGST (now owned by WD) and it's called HelioSeal. The drive chassis is tin plated steel that is laser welded inside an He filled chamber creating a hermetically sealed enclosure. The pressure inside the enclosure is slightly lower than atmospheric, but He is still lost very slowly through diffusion. Given this process it's difficult to imagine a feasible repair technique; one would have to cut open the chassis and later reseal it in an He atmosphere.
Something to consider; there is no means of restoring a flash cell to service after it's been worn out, yet that hasn't prevented widespread and highly successful Flash adoption. I doubt the unserviceable nature of Helium filled drives will impede adoption.
[EDIT] WD has a 4TB hybrid drive, but couldn't find any others larger than 2TB
The one you linked to is 20.5 mm thick and weighs 540 g including the enclosure. I'm not even sure whether there's a single 4 TB drive in there, since a pair of 2 TB, 7 mm Seagate drives would be both thinner and lighter.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/191749967307
Seagate also used to offer a "Backup Plus Fast 4TB" external drive that had a pair of 9.5mm 2TB drives in it:
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_backup_plus_fast_portab...
http://media02.hongkiat.com/vintage-tech-ads/hardisk-waiting...
Contemplate this for a moment. Not exactly plug-and-play!
The 70mb Unix drives were iirc about $4000 in 80's dollars. Or maybe that was the 4mb of memory. I actually have the sales brochure and have to dig that up.
Edit: Yes I do mean 10MB!
Oh, I believe you. I say that because I was skimming to see if anyone could "beat" me. You tied. :-) And the only reason I was skimming was to comment to parent, who said they thought they'd never fill a 13Gb drive: yeah, that's what I thought when I bought a 10Mb drive 30 years ago.
Now, I don't think you can even buy media that small. Hell, the internet is infested with single web pages that wouldn't fit on that drive.
First moderately modern drive was a Rodime 3.5" 10MB. Smuggled out of the factory somehow (which was just down the road from where I worked). That was the first drive that looked like they still do today.
By any chance did you ever use gwbasic?
An auto-parking drive was such a revelation after that one.
Almost six orders of magnitude advancement. I do wonder if humanity will every be able to pull such a stunt again.
My father bought a Nascom 1 as his first computer, which was a DIY kit if I remember correctly. We still have it around. :)
My first contact with a computer was the BBC Micro B. Such a wonderful machine and I still power it up a few times per year! Chuckie Egg and Castle Quest ftw! ;)
Before that we briefly had an Amstrad CPC512 with two floppies and nothing else :D
Interestingly, still 1 in 10^15 unrecoverable bit error rate[1]. What that means from a practical standpoint is that you are essentially guaranteed an unrecoverable bit read error if you read the drive end to end (as you would if you were re-silvering a RAID 1 mirror), and in a RAID6 configuration I'm guessing it will take about a week to reconstruct a failed drive at low priority. All that storage behind a single port which has a sequential transfer rate of 255 MBs[1].
[1] https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_ass...
That sounds scary, but if I remember a research paper from a few years ago (reading smaller drives multiple times over), these are very conservative estimates.
Also, I think you're an order of magnitude off --- 10^15 bits is close to 100TB, not 10TB.
We will eventually reach the limit on what the human body can perceive in terms of audio and video quality (if we haven’t already yet, I know it’s quite debatable whether there is a perceptible difference between v0 and FLAC for instance) and that coupled with the amount of media a human can reasonably consume in a lifetime might sort of put a cap on the amount of storage needed by the typical consumer. This is of course assuming no new technology like IPFS comes along that might incentivize storing other people’s data or some other similar radical technological innovation.
And what is a decent collection of media? With high standards for multimedia you may only get a few dozen TV shows or maybe 50 or so movies per 2TB drive.
As for music, in today's age there isn't much reason to settle for less than FLAC, you will still be very hard-pressed to fill up 2TB with just music. I've recently taken to ripping music videos and adding them to my artist folders and I'm still having a hard time filling up my damn music drive.
Of course, people have different reasons for storing media. For some it's just about quantity and not quality, but some of us are preparing for the digital dark ages and want to make sure our media is of the highest quality so that it might be useful to others one day. It's all about that 48/96khz 24-bit, baby.
I once thought experience was enough for me, however I've learned that memory fades. I can only recall bits and pieces of things I thought I'd never forget.
There's nothing that jostles my memory quite as well as a picture.
My impression (from helping family set up off-to-college computers over the past couple of years) is that modern teenagers typically have over a TB of photos shot on their iphones. And that doesn't include video. They're on track to need 5 TB of storage just for still photos by the end of their lifetime.
> We will eventually reach the limit on what the human body can perceive in terms of audio and video quality
Maybe on a flat screen across the living room. But when you have, say, 20k (~800 megapixels), you can expand the field of view to cover the entire sphere. Add in computational photography that allows refocusing and a (limited) amount of movement, and there is the potential for amateur-shot video to soak up any amount of storage you can buy.
> assuming no new technology like IPFS comes along that might incentivize storing other people’s data
ipfs is more about addressing and distributing data, you still have to store your own stuff.
But the enemy of large HDDs is the broadband connection, not our limited ability to consume. If it weren't for the broadband connection, we'd have to host the content locally.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/9/20/12986234/b...
Or has the tech matured to the point, where even small and medium size company are happy with these 12TB HDD, and larger HDD only mattered to a few such as Google, Netflix, Amazon, Blackblaze, OVH, Microsoft and Apple etc.