
Western Digital Announces Ultrastar He12 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs - seycombi
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10888/western-digital-announces-ultrastar-he12-12-tb-and-14-tb-hdds
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sergiotapia
I'm guessing these aren't really consumer drives. :(

Might as well ask here. My 2TB Plex hard drive is getting full. What's the
best solution if I want say 10TB to store my media for Plex but very hands
off?

I don't want to weld any contraption just plug something in and have it be
visible by Windows 10.

~~~
fnord123
>Might as well ask here. My 2TB Plex hard drive is getting full. What's the
best solution if I want say 10TB to store my media for Plex but very hands
off?

You probably need a NAS. To store 10TB securely you are looking at a bill of
materials of about ~1200usd. This includes a NAS from synology and 3 6TD
Western Digital Red drives. This will give you 12TB of storage space running
in a RAID5 configuration.

Synology DS416 NAS diskless: 365USD WD Red 6TB: 253USD (x3) Total: 1124

For a little more you could pick up a HP Microserver for just under 400USD and
run ZFS on a pool with SMBD and get about the same results but with more hands
on fun.

Alternatively, just aim your requirements a bit lower (e.g. only 6TB) and pick
up a 2 disk nas and 2 drives running as a mirror and it will be much cheaper
(~700-800USD).

Resources: [http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx](http://www.raid-
calculator.com/default.aspx)

~~~
MattSteelblade
Don't run 12TB of data with consumer hardware in a RAID5. If you have the
money stick with RAID 1, 10, maybe 6 or even JBOD.

~~~
tachion
RAID 6 will be almost as slow and vulnerable as RAID 5. The best one in terms
of speed and data security would be RAID 10 or RAID 100.

~~~
X86BSD
Gah! Why is anyone even uttering the word "RAID". Ugh. ZFS people. ZFS.

~~~
fnord123
What's the implication here? Do you eat the 50% storage efficiency with
mirrored pools? Or do you use a wider stripe for better resiliency (raidz2,
raidz3)?

~~~
X86BSD
I run stripped mirrors with ZFS. 2x2. RAIDZ is simply to slow in comparison.
Like A LOT slower. Ill just eat the storage loss with mirrors. Disk is cheap.

~~~
raattgift
Disk is cheap, but how you attach the disks starts becoming an important cost
component as you add more disks. :-(

 _IOPS_ aren't cheap, and you will find out just how much that matters the
moment you have to replace a disk in a pool with a lot of data in it. Resilver
times of days can be pretty agonizing in a home setting.

I won't build a pool without at least double redundancy per rotating-drive
vdev, meaning at least 3-way mirrors (zpool create foo mirror disk0 disk1
disk2 mirror disk3 disk4 disk5) or raidz2, as I have had to go to backups for
failures during resilvers of raidz (never again!) and 2-way mirrors.

3-way mirrors conveniently provide high read IOPS. OpenZFS does a good job
aggregating and scheduling writes to the point that writes are mainly choked
by random reads. (Very full pools induce quasi-random reads while hunting for
space in metaslabs, which is the main reason writes to very full pools perform
poorly).

2-way mirrors are only really fine for vdevs that have negligible random-
access penalty (and thus likely high IOPS), or where rebuilding an entire pool
from backups takes time comparable to resilver and scrub times when dealing
with a replacement leaf device that might fail during resilvering (you cannot
know the data on the replacment device is OK until you have read it, which
generally means scrub-after-resilver), or errors reading the surviving leaf
device(s).

------
KaiserPro
_each standard server rack can store 2400 TB of data if fully populated with
10 TB_

240 disks in a rack??
[http://www.advancedhpc.com/data_storage/raid_storage/dell/PV...](http://www.advancedhpc.com/data_storage/raid_storage/dell/PV_md3260.html)
60 disks per 4u

Thats 600 in a 42u rack

~~~
dom0
SuperMicro has a 90 disk top-loading 4U storage server. It's deeper, of
course.

However, they probably thought about standard 2U servers with no second disk
row, so 12 disks per 2U = 252 disks / rack.

~~~
KaiserPro
Ah, yeah, forgot about those. so many disks.

edit:
[https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/946/SC946ED-R...](https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/946/SC946ED-R2KJBOD)
if you want to look and drool.

~~~
dom0
I think the Sun Thumper kinda invented the concept - many successful copies
since :)

------
mattbillenstein
HDD is the new tape.

~~~
epistasis
Nearly. It has the benefit of being random access, but for backup purposes it
has the disadvantage of 1) being online (usually), 2) high per-drive overhead
(even with huge SAS JBODs chained together), 3) shorter lifespan.

Of course nobody wants to deal with the difficulties of tape, and tapes have
not kept up with the density of drives, either.

~~~
bluedino
We're going to dead end soon with SSD's right? Once we get to a certain
density. Then what? You can't get any 'better' than that, like you did going
from paper tape to magnetic tape to disks to flash

~~~
kibwen
Here's Intel's bet on the next generation of storage tech beyond Flash:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint)

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tdb7893
I've yet to find something more impressive to me than the fact that a hard
drive can accurately find a single bit out of trillions on a spinning disk.

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tristanb
Helium is really hard to contain, (just ask SpaceX!) Do these leak and
degrade, or do they have some magical way to keep the gas in?

~~~
planteen
Here's a whitepaper from Seagate with some details:
[http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-
content/ent...](http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-
content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-
capacity-3-5-hdd-10tb/_shared/docs/helium-drive-launch-tp686-1-1602us.pdf)

Sounds like they design them for a 5 year life.

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bluedino
Are these what people theorized Dropbox was using to get the densities they
claimed in the BackBlaze pod threads?

~~~
wmf
There was talk about Dropbox using 14TB drives. It's possible that these
drives have actually existed for over a year and HGST is only now deciding to
announce them to the public, but there's really no evidence one way or the
other.

The cloud space is full of rumors about awesome yet secret equipment but they
don't really pass Occam's Razor since if it's so awesome why keep it secret?

~~~
tw04
>since if it's so awesome why keep it secret?

Because if Facebook or Google says "I'll take every drive you can make for the
next year", you've got guaranteed minimum revenues for the next 12 months.

If you tell them they can only have half, and you release the other half to
the retail market, they may or may not sell in the quantities you're hoping
for. And you will likely loose the contract for goog/fb.

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mike503
Just wish someone would come out with a chassis like Synology DS2416's and
such. I've been using my actual Synology for so many years because I keep
holding out the perfect chassis comes out.

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ctingom
I bought a Synology NAS this year: Highlights include the Amazon Cloud Drive
backup, Plex Server, and it can hold four 4TB drives. No problems so far.

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Jerry2
Why helium? I know it's inert but there are many other noble gases. Why not
some other gas? Also, why not create a vacuum to minimize friction?

~~~
dom0
Vacuum = requires special lubricants or no lubricants at all, since they would
dissipate due to the lowered vapour pressure. Lubricant everywhere would
likely be problematic.

It's also harder to seal in, and would likely require a much more rigid
construction to avoid warping of the drive (these are precision devices after
all).

Lastly, the hovering of the R/W heads over the platters requires an atmosphere
- they are lifted by the air/gas accelerated by the platters (this is a well
defined lift force and self-regulates the head height relative to the
platter).

