back to article Capacity limits are utter tosh: Toshiba fattens SSD, disk with flash layers, helium

Analysis Toshiba is looking to boosted flash and disk capacities to grow storage revenues and help returned the troubled company to growth. In a July 6 in-house presentation investor relations briefing by Yasuo Naruke, President and CEO of Toshiba’s Storage and Electronic Devices Solutions Company, information was revealed …

  1. Suricou Raven

    Hurry it up!

    I've got sixteen drives in my home server, and I really want to bring that down.

  2. Sleep deprived
    Boffin

    Helium filled

    You'd wonder why aren't the disk platters in a vacuum, but it seems the read/write heads need a gas layer to hover over the platters. I was once told if these heads were the size of a 747, they would hover a foot above ground.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Helium filled

      You'd be correct. Look up the Bernoulli Effect to see why spinning rust requires the presence of a gas at present.

  3. Black Rat
    Devil

    Whoopsie!

    "16TB drives scheduled for 1018"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Whoopsie!

      Just in time for the battle of hasting I presume.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. gudguy1a

      Re: Whoopsie!

      @Black Rat, yep, good topic but that and a couple of other typos and errors got me distracted...

  4. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    Interesting

    Very off-topic, but it was interesting to see his slide where he refers to the crash of '08 as the "Lehman collapse". I don't know I've ever seen it called that before.

  5. Jim O'Reilly
    Holmes

    They got their own price wrong!

    I thought this useful right until I saw the Toshiba price per drive data in the first chart. Their SAS enterprise drive clocks in at around $30,000, based on $30/GB. That may be Toshiba's system price, but it beats even EMC's massive markups.

    SATA SSDs good enough for enterprise work are around $300 (forget all the enterprise and near-line hoopla). That's Dell's price for such a drive! The differential sort of makes mincemeat of Toshiba's whole presentation.

  6. rsole

    Capacity growth has slowed right down

    So in the next five years the capacity is forecast to increase by around 50%.

    This contrasts with the doubling of capacity/density with each new generation not so many years ago.

    If data use is growing faster then this means demand must be going up, or am I wrong?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why helium?

    Well, helium being a very light gas (only hydrogen is less dense), is obviously dust and moisture free and is also chemically inert. As a result the lifetime of the drive should be a lot longer and also friction within the bearings is lower so self heating is less of an issue.

    I've also read somewhere that if hydrogen were used there would be deleterious effects on the data layers as H2 can induce cracking in some alloys.

    Incidentally helium is also apparently used in Philips LED light bulbs to conduct heat from the "filament" to the outside air more efficiently.

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