News - HGST ships its helium-filled 6TB Ultrastar He6 3.5-inch HDD

[HEXUS]

Sealed-in Helium, rather than regular air, provides several significant advantages.

Read more.

[Jiamenguk]

I guess they mean the helium they're using is 1/7th the density of air, considering you can compress or expand gases to quite a huge range of densities...

[David Wheeldon]

Would a Vacuum give better results

[Noli]

Now this is some innovation... meh, I don't like the sound of 7 platters plus don't really trust HGST.

@Jiamenguk 1/7th density at same atmospheric pressure, volume, temp. etc. presumably.

[UseItNow]

Nice warranty on them!

[peterb]

Would a Vacuum give better results

Only until you loaded the heads on the platters! The heads fly on a cushion of air/gas above the platters. If the chamber was evacuated, there would be nothing for the heads to fly in!

[crossy]

HGST guarantees its hermetic helium seal for a period of five years.

So presumably if a load of these start leaking in a datacenter (SAN?) then it's going to be pretty obvious - sys admins start talking like Joe Pasquale. I definitely want to see the YouTube video of that.

I am, of course, not being serious, (although the YT video would be classic).

[Noxvayl]

I haven't managed to fill the 2TB of storage I currently have.

[zdn1042]

Hope it won't be too expensive once released.

[crossy]

I haven't managed to fill the 2TB of storage I currently have.

I envy you - I've got:
1 x 60GB SSD for the OS (nearly full - then again 60GB these days is USB stick territory)
1 x 1TB HDD split into 250GB for games (can't install BF4 because there's not enough free space) and 750GB for user storage (also pretty full - but then again I've got a good few DVD rips online that I really should purge)
1 x 2TB HDD reserved for various backups. Mainly Windows ones, but it's also where I put my Photoshop backups

I'm seriously trying to source a decent 500GB drive to move off my apps partition and would love to be able to slap in at least another 2TB for backups. If funds permit I might swap out my 2TB for a 3TB WD Caviar Green, and move the 2TB to an eSATA/USB crate I've got for "offline" backups shortly.

People just have more stuff these days - I remember (not so long ago) when laptops came with 100GB or 200GB drives, now it's 750GB and 1TB.

[herulach]

How have you filled 2TB of disk by backing up a 60GB one - how many versions do you need? I'm somewhat spoilt by having 6TB in my NAS, but thats only because the marginal cost wasn't much extra - I've only got about 1TB of stuff on there.

[CK_1985]

Nice bit of lateral thinking there - really puts into perspective how far HDD technology has come if it's getting to the stage where friciton caused by the air is the next limiting factor!

Of course it would all be redundant if SSD technology would hurry up and get down to the few-pence-per gigabyte territory, but then I'm just impatient like that

[aidanjt]

Only until you loaded the heads on the platters! The heads fly on a cushion of air/gas above the platters. If the chamber was evacuated, there would be nothing for the heads to fly in!

Strictly speaking the gas cushion is only really needed to stop a head crash. If the heads were mounted on a more solid actuator structure it could operate in a vacuum no problem at all. Easier said than done, of course, any lubricants have to remain liquid even when warm in a vacuum, and the traditional tinpot lid would have to be replaced with a stronger lid to stop the atmosphere from crushing it and breaching the vacuum. Not gonna be cheap, might even be more trouble than its worth, but helium-filled disks are a good step in that direction, I guess.

[DanceswithUnix]

Nice warranty on them!

I think these are enterprise drives, not consumer drives, so it has to be.

[crossy]

How have you filled 2TB of disk by backing up a 60GB one - how many versions do you need? I'm somewhat spoilt by having 6TB in my NAS, but thats only because the marginal cost wasn't much extra - I've only got about 1TB of stuff on there.

I didn't say that my 2TB was OS-only backups - it's a standard Windows7 backup plan, so that's OS plus user files and apps. So that's a long way from "merely" 60GB.

Yes, I know - I should use offline storage (DAS or NAS) and something a bit more professional than the bundled Windows Backup. But everytime I've looked at Paragon, Acronis, etc there's been a lot of posts about how they slow a system down and, worst still, don't actually produce backups you can rely on.

I really should pull my finger out and get a better backup strategy, but that means spending a lot of money and time. Neither of which I have at the moment - just had to get a new(er) car and replace my motherboard.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Meh!

Perhaps we can now have HDD prices which are the same before the flood excuse??

Its pathetic a 2TB drive costs more than it did in 2011 and has a shorter warranty too.