back to article WDC's shingle-free stocking filler: A 10TB helium disk drive

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) has updated its Ultrastar He8 to the He10, providing the same capacity as the shingled HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 announced in June but without the shingling, meaning standard write speeds. Compared to the He8 it has 25 per cent more capacity, and WDC says it has a 56 per cent lower watts/TB …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Will we see 10TB desktop drives? El Reg does not see any obstacle to that, beyond a marketing assessment by the WDC market bean-counters."

    Basically, the answer is, "Not yet." The consumer sphere is still getting used to 5TB drives (mostly external), and these usually come with the caveat that writing this much data at once raises the risk of silent corruption so should be used with care (I use dedicated copying programs like FastCopy that default to write-and-verify to help prevent this).

    Anyway, this stuff is pretty much cutting edge rust tech, so the price tag is going to be high and the demand restricted at this point to applications that really, REALLY need a lot of data in a small amount of space. I suspect consumer drives will see shingling tech before helium tech (as in the consumer sphere, large drives tend to be used for bulk storage and other offload-type applications where time is less of an issue than capacity).

    1. Ian Michael Gumby
      Boffin

      @AC... Will we see 10TB desktop drives? Nope.

      First you can always put a 10TB SATA server drive in a desktop box... no one is stopping you from doing that... however the real question is why?

      Assume for a second that the hype around Crossbar's ReRAM (Resistive Ram) technology is real.

      A 1cm^2 chip could potentially hold 1TB of storage. Now imagine a 2.5" SSD sized card that contains these chips along with the controller chips...

      Granted that SATA ||| is too slow to really take advantage of these chips, designing the SSD-like ReRAM would be a no brainer and would give you something in the realm of 16TB using less power and generating less heat and noise than a 10TB drive.

      Imagine a full sized PCIe card. Now you have more than 32TB+ of faster storage.

      Or take the SansDisk approach like their UltraDIMMs that used DDR3 formats. Imagine using DDR5 (today's latest memory footprint.) Each DIMM could theoretically have 4TB of storage or more.

      So depending on your form factor... you could have 16GB of RAM (2x8GB ) and 8TB of storage without any hard drives until you add a PCIe card. (Assuming 4 slots)

      So ask yourself why do you want all of this noise, and heat from spinning rust? Much easier to fry a ReRAM chip than it is to destroy a hard drive of spinning rust. (for those paranoid)

      With ReRAM around the corner, you're going to see a disruptive change in terms of computing power and form factor.

      To your point... you can build a server that has 4 PCIe slots. Fill this with ReRAM cards... even raided, you have 32+TB in a small box. (Typical ATX cases are 4U).

      32TB is a lot of storage.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @AC... Will we see 10TB desktop drives? Nope.

        Crossbar's prototype was impressive, but I suspect it's slightly further in the future than 'just around the corner.' Not that I doubt that RRAM will be available to purchase in the next couple of years, just that every time I've heard 'X will replace HDDs' it has turned out to be overly optimistic - flash has only just replaced HDDs in desktop applications, yet 'spinning rust' still manages to hang on despite all predictions to the contrary.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @AC... Will we see 10TB desktop drives? Nope.

        > Assume for a second that the hype around Crossbar's ReRAM (Resistive Ram)

        > technology is real.

        That's a big "if", given that (a) said technology isn't available to buy yet; (b) if and when it is, we have no idea what the price will be, nor what interfaces/form factors the manufacturers will choose, or market segments they aim at.

        If they aim at the enterprise/performance market first, expect to pay a big premium for quite a long time.

        > why do you want all of this noise, and heat from spinning rust?

        Because I have data that I want to store today? :-)

      3. Mike Moyle

        Re: @AC... Will we see 10TB desktop drives? Nope.

        More importantly, if you put your music library on a helium-filled drive the singers' voices get all high-pitched chipmunk-y sounding.

      4. PleebSmasher

        Re: @AC... Will we see 10TB desktop drives? Nope.

        @Gumby Even if it hits the market with those specs, what will it cost per GB/TB? Much more than 3 cents per GB.

        3D XPoint would kill NAND if it was at the same price per GB. But it will be 3-5x more expensive at launch.

        The 1 TB per square cm claim is suspect anyway. 3D XPoint looks like a nearly identical technology and will not deliver that density soon.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm going to wait for hydrogen filled drives.

    1. Sir Alien
      Mushroom

      That's rather explosive data you have there.

      1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
        Flame

        be a shame if anything..... .. happened to it

    2. Adam 1

      Hydrogen drives have an amazing immediate secure erase function too.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      it the viscosity of air is the problem, why replace the air with helium? wouldn't a near vacuum be more effective?

      1. Sir Alien

        The problem with vacuum (near or complete) is thermal conductivity. The air (or in this case helium) circulating keeps certain parts of the drive from overheating.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Not when your heads rely on the Bernoulli Principle to maintain a microscopic cushion of gas between the head and the platter as a safety measure (direct contact is the etymological origin of the term "hard drive crash"). Since you MUST have a gas to use the Bernoulli Principle, you might as well go with the lightest gas around that won't react to anything. That falls to Helium, atomic number 2 and an inert noble gas.

  3. Terry Cloth
    Coat

    Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

    I recognize that the industrial price will differ from the consumer price, but just out of curiosity, could you mention it? (But that's my wallet I'm getting out of my coat.)

    1. Sir Alien

      Re: Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

      Well if the He8 (8TB) is going for around $600 to $800 I would imagine at least that but probably $1000. My wallet spontaneously combusted the moment I saw this.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

        Its all relative. 24 years ago I remember seeing a 1GB 5.25" external drive that cost a mere $2500, and being amazed at how affordable a whole gigantic gigabyte was.

        Now I have more RAM than that in my phone.

      2. Ian Michael Gumby

        @Alien Re: Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

        Why?

        Look, lets get real.

        Do you have 10TB of data that you need to store?

        Putting 4x of these in a RAID 10 NAS/SAN will give you 20TB of usable storage and reliability.

        That's a lot of data.

        If you're looking at a 4K movie jukebox... you've got a long way to go before you have enough available content to fill that up... and even then... you could probably afford it...

        1. Steven Roper

          Re: @Alien Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

          "Do you have 10TB of data that you need to store?"

          I have over 6 TB of 3D CGI models and their various textures, materials, scene and stage files on my system. I know that's my own hobby and probably not a common scenario, but others likely have similar collections relating to their hobbies as well.

          On top of that, I've collected over 8 TB of various movies, TV shows and music video clips over the years, since I never delete any of these that I rip or download in case they ever get censored or made unavailable (my Dukes of Hazzard collection being a case in point!)

          My music collection also runs over 3 TB, since I have the entire discographies of Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Rossini and Wagner in lossless FLAC, a full collection of contemporary composers like Jarre, Vangelis, Williams, Goldsmith and Horner, as well as almost every pop/chart hit released from Bill Haley to Lady Gaga, lovingly collected over the past two decades.

          So I've already amassed 17 TB of data on my various home boxen, and that's only going to increase over time. A drive like this would be a godsend to a data packrat like me!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: @Alien Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

            10 TB and growing. I happen to be weeding at this moment before I deposit the new off site. There's archives that never seem to be needed, hell to figure out how much that amounts to, but significant. Oh, I don't do video. Now datasets....

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            @Steven Roper

            Yes, I can certainly see where someone might need 10 TB in cases like yours, but do you see that you are reaching the end of the line for 'needing more'? The reason storage needs kept climbing is that we kept getting richer and richer media to feed our senses. We're now at the limit of what our senses can perceive with no room left to go richer.

            In the 80s people mostly dealt with text files, or lightly formatted word/excel type files, maybe some simple MIDI files. Pictures and audio files were rare, video non-existent (MPEG2 didn't even exist) If you were one of the lucky ones with a hard drive, 20 - 40 MB was about it. In the 90s you got pictures and MP3s, but video was still rare. Hard drives became common, but were still measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes until the end of the decade. In the 00s you got lower quality video, now we get high quality HD video with 4K video on the horizon, and hard drive sizes exploded three orders of magnitude in size in 15 years.

            Where is the richer media of tomorrow that will cause another order of magnitude demand for storage? There isn't any, even 4K is pretty much pushing what people will care to demand. Unless we can do some sort of 3D volumetric display, we are reaching the end of the line - simply dictated by our senses.

            The same is true for internet speeds. There's little point in having a gigabit connection, but certainly once you have one there's hardly any reason imaginable why you should need more. You could stream a dozen 4K Blu Ray quality videos at once at that speed. Unless you want to be a major bittorrent node and pirate every movie and song ever made, there's not much point to having a 10 Gbps connection and 100 TB hard drive.

            Now when I've posted something like this before some dumbass always comes along with the "640K should be enough for everybody" but when I repeatedly ask for the use cases for internet speeds greater than a gigabit no one can ever come up with a reasonable answer aside from hand waving about copying multi gigabyte files to/from work instantly, as if that's a thing normal people do on a regular basis and can't afford to wait 30 seconds to have happen. I'd lump drives greater than 10 TB in with that, though someone like you who works with very large files might need more simply by keeping a copy of every version of every file you ever work with. An improved filesystem that does deduplication and only needs space for the deltas would be the fix for that.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: @Steven Roper

              It doesn't have to be richer media, just more media, which does keep getting produced (which is why television and cinemas still thrive). As long as content keeps getting produced, there will be packrats who will want to collect it for the sake of collecting it in case some "keep passing the tapes" moment comes.

        2. Lusty

          Re: @Alien Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

          "Putting 4x of these in a RAID 10"

          RAID 10 and RAID 5 are incredibly bad ideas when you get over 2TB on a drive. They aren't ideal below that either. The probability of read errors on spinning drives means that you're more likely to lose the whole RAID group than recover it when rebuilding. Dual parity RAID with horizontal and diagonal parity gives a significantly better chance of recovery of your data.

          Disk failures are not the only cause of data loss, individual blocks can and do disappear - this is the purpose of RAID, and if you only have one other copy of the block or one parity then you absolutely can't afford a double failure whether the second failure is a block or a disk.

          1. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: @Alien Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

            Raid 10 is viable on large datasets provided you use at _least_ 3-way mirroring.

            As for raid5 - forget it. Even raid is marginal on large sets (we've lost R6 set in rebuild) and there's the write hole to contend with. Better to go zfs raidz3.

        3. chivo243 Silver badge

          Re: @Alien Not to be picky, but how much do they cost?

          I'm at 8tb or so on the various devices around the house. My music library is copied to multiple locations for redundancy. So, a couple of these babies would be a big help covering my assets.

  4. kain preacher

    Who wants to rebuild a raid with drives if one fails ?How time is that going to take ?

    1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Not as long as recovering whatever is/was on the failed drive...

    2. Lusty

      @Kain

      Rebuild time is the least of your worries. Data loss is the big issue when rebuilding large drives and means you need more drives in the set and more parity so although the drives are larger, you can store less bits per bit as it were making the increase less useful than it seems although still worthwhile.

      These offer only 5.4TiB more capacity in a 5 drive RAID 6 setup than 8TB drives so arguably expanding the RAID group to 6 drives from 5 is a better option unless you absolutely need the biggest capacity available or need the extra throughput for something like UHD video editing.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More big

    More fail

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More big

      What's more fail? If you get more than one and manage accordingly, you reduce the odds of a catastrophic failure. Meanwhile, it's better to have too much space than not enough, especially if big data is your line of work.

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