News - Western Digital announces 8TB and 10TB Helium filled HDDs

[kompukare]

considering a 6tb drive is currently £185 inc vat delivered and these are very new to market, if they are going to be in that kind of pricing region upon release (ie. £ per gb) they could do well. instead of having a server with umpteen discs you can have 2 in mirrored raid

2 sounds a bit risky. They don't mention the sequential write speed anywhere on their site or the PDF, but I'm guessing it's rather slow. So if one guess down it would take ages to rebuild. I think RAID5 is the minimum this should be used in.

[SUMMONER]

I take it those are N54Ls? What sort of setup are you running on them? Are they RAID? What sort of parity and useable space do you get?

I'm still considering using one of mine as a NAS, but keep holding off on drives. The WD 4TBs are looking like good value at the moment, if the Miscroserver supports them.

Two of the older N36L models actually.

They are both running a variant of DSM. Each is setup with a single Raid 5 type array. The total usable space according to Windows is 10.8TB, and I should be able to expand to 13.5TB, by adding a sixth drive via the eSATA port.

[DanceswithUnix]

2 sounds a bit risky. They don't mention the sequential write speed anywhere on their site or the PDF, but I'm guessing it's rather slow. So if one guess down it would take ages to rebuild. I think RAID5 is the minimum this should be used in.

An interesting thought, usually raid-Z and BTRFS have an advantage during rebuild that they only write where there is actual data to rebuild rather than raid-5 where every block is done. On a shingled drive where multiple tracks may have to be written for every write, I wonder if that advantage is lost.

[Splash]

The problem with SSDs though is that they aren't reliable enough to replace the HDD, especially in enterprise markets.

I'd disagree. The problem with SSDs is that they're too expensive to replace the HDD in the enterprise. How many enterprise environments are running on nothing but flash? The likes of Pure Storage would like to change that, but there's a place for spinning rust as part of a tiered storage strategy and likely will be for a number of years to come.

[kompukare]

An interesting thought, usually raid-Z and BTRFS have an advantage during rebuild that they only write where there is actual data to rebuild rather than raid-5 where every block is done. On a shingled drive where multiple tracks may have to be written for every write, I wonder if that advantage is lost.

Hadn't read up on Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) when I made that comment. Rather I was just thinking if this does something like 170MB/s sequential (like the 6TB Helium drives). 10TB = 10,000,000MB and 10,000,000 divided by 170MB = 56,497 secs = 941 min = 15.7 hrs. And with a failure on a 2 drive setup, that's 16hrs where the other drive could also fail. Too risky for me.

If the SMR on these drives means the performance is a lot less than 170MB/s then that just makes it even riskier.

[DanceswithUnix]

Hadn't read up on Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) when I made that comment. Rather I was just thinking if this does something like 170MB/s sequential (like the 6TB Helium drives). 10TB = 10,000,000MB and 10,000,000 divided by 170MB = 56,497 secs = 941 min = 15.7 hrs. And with a failure on a 2 drive setup, that's 16hrs where the other drive could also fail. Too risky for me.

If the SMR on these drives means the performance is a lot less than 170MB/s then that just makes it even riskier.

That's the interesting bit. If you were going to be writing new data to those inner shingles anyway then there shouldn't be any performance degradation. That is packed with assumptions though, so the reality may well fall short.

[kellyharding]

The Hindenburg of HDDs, taking with it countless innocent bits and bytes when it crashes and burns...

Hidenburg was filled with Hydrogen, not Helium

Same difference...

Big difference actually

Have been considering upgrading my RAID array from 4x2Tb, 4x10Tb would be nice...

[HalloweenJack]

Same difference...

erm helium is a noble gas ergo its inert and doesn't burn at all - only when subjected to pressure and at 100 million degree`s do you get a triple alpha process and is the result of 3 helium nuclei collide to form a carbon nucleus

[azrael-]

Big difference actually

Have been considering upgrading my RAID array from 4x2Tb, 4x10Tb would be nice...

erm helium is a noble gas ergo its inert and doesn't burn at all - only when subjected to pressure and at 100 million degree`s do you get a triple alpha process and is the result of 3 helium nuclei collide to form a carbon nucleus

Well, you both managed to kill a perfectly good joke...

[Unique]

Hadn't read up on Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) when I made that comment. Rather I was just thinking if this does something like 170MB/s sequential (like the 6TB Helium drives). 10TB = 10,000,000MB and 10,000,000 divided by 170MB = 56,497 secs = 941 min = 15.7 hrs. And with a failure on a 2 drive setup, that's 16hrs where the other drive could also fail. Too risky for me.

If the SMR on these drives means the performance is a lot less than 170MB/s then that just makes it even riskier.

it depends on what the setup is for. for a home setup 16 hours on the off chance that a drive may go faulty isn't a problem. just leave it running overnight or whilst at work. 2x10tb drives instead of 20x2tb drives or 10x4tb drives, surely a lot lesser power, and it's usually a lot cheaper for a 2 drive NAS than even a 4 bay one

[DanceswithUnix]

it depends on what the setup is for. for a home setup 16 hours on the off chance that a drive may go faulty isn't a problem. just leave it running overnight or whilst at work. 2x10tb drives instead of 20x2tb drives or 10x4tb drives, surely a lot lesser power, and it's usually a lot cheaper for a 2 drive NAS than even a 4 bay one

He was talking about 12x10TB drives in a rack at the end of a 1Gb WAN link, so I think we can be fairly sure it is a commercial setup

OTOH, if you can stuff a couple more in the rack to have RAID 6 and a hot spare, then you should be OK. From hearing the storage guys at work talking, I would expect 12 bays to be a single RAID6 stripe, though our NAS boxes do require big stripe sets to keep up with us so perhaps we are a bit of a special case.

[theleader]

I hope if the helium escapes from these drives, you can take them to the local balloon shop for a refill!

[this_is_gav]

Just give up on HDD's already. SSD's are already far denser than HDD's, which apart from price used to be their one advantage.

The problem with SSDs though is that they aren't reliable enough to replace the HDD, especially in enterprise markets.

I'm not saying this is going to be the same since they separated, but under Hitachi these were the least reliable drive manufacturers going. Even ignoring the IBM Deathstar fiasco, if a laptop hard drive failed, you took it out and it didn't have a Hitachi sticker on it it was a rarity.

I'm sure their reliability is better now (it could barely be worse), but their history is atrocious. An SSD made chocolate would have a fighting chance.

[LSG501]

Have to say in my own experiences Hitachi drives have been my most reliable drives (touch wood lol), western digital were my worst experience.

[kingpotnoodle]

The Hindenburg of HDDs, taking with it countless innocent bits and bytes when it crashes and burns...

That would be Hydrogen... I don't think an H filled drive would last long.

Helium is inert.

The problem with SSDs though is that they aren't reliable enough to replace the HDD, especially in enterprise markets.

Try too expensive and too small capacity for many scenarios. SSDs are fine for all but the very highest write IOPs jobs, and even then if you don't care for the longevity of the drive you can just burn and replace them - hence RAID, because HDD were never that reliable either.

Point me at an 4-8TB SSD which is anywhere near the same cost/GB as a HDD. Not all workloads need SSD performance and high write endurance, i.e. cold storage in cloud datacentres. Consider also a typical 2U SAN, DAS or NAS chassis, i.e. the HP P2000 which you can buy with a backplane to fit either 12x 3.5" or 24 x 2.5". Using 3.5" drives you can still achieve higher capacity (if that is your primary goal) because 2.5" drives top out at 2TB.

12x 6TB, leaving 1 hotspare and using RAID 6 means 9x6TB with current drives, so 54GB.
24x 2TB, leaving 2x hotspare (same spare:used ratio) and RAID 6 means 20x2TB so 40TB.

[Laststop]

The Hindenburg of HDDs, taking with it countless innocent bits and bytes when it crashes and burns...

hindenburg used hydrogen not helium