
Western Digital Ships 12 TB WD Gold HDD: 8 Platters and Helium - el_duderino
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11842/western-digital-ships-12-tb-wd-gold-hdd-8-platters-helium
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esaym
8 platters? Seems like it might be extra loud...

Speaking of which.. what is a good hard drive that is above 1tb that is extra
loud? I want my kids to grow up with a loud hard drive just like I did....

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fencepost
I believe the Black drives have a reputation for being pretty noisy.

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devonkim
The WD 1 TB Black drive I bought in 2009 (and still works great) is rather
quiet to my ears and I'm a complete PC silence freak to the point I bought a
liquid cooled 1080 Ti to avoid the cooling fans from running on the video card
itself.

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sireat
What provisions are there on restoring these Helium HDDs to working order 10+
years from now on?

Helium will leak so that is an extra problem to deal with in preserving data.

Regular HDDs, replace a controller or even open up old HDDs and run them open
in a clean room no problem.

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labcomputer
It might not be that bad, actually (unless you open it up).

Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of a
standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure
differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by
countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside).

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kogepathic
_> Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of
a standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure
differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by
countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside)._

While this would probably be true for almost any other gas, Helium is
devilishly small and can permeate through the metal over time. [0]

[0] [http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-filled-10tb-
harddri...](http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-filled-10tb-
harddrive/25/)

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aidenn0
Have 2.5" rotating drives stopped growing? Last time I checked, flash drives
were too expensive, but rotating media topped out at 2TB

[EDIT] WD has a 4TB hybrid drive, but couldn't find any others larger than 2TB

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jseliger
That's strange—there have been physically small 4TB HDs for a while:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9489/seagate-backup-plus-
porta...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9489/seagate-backup-plus-portable-4tb-
usb-30-drive-review) . I have this one or one like it as a Time Machine
backup.

~~~
kijin
These drives tend to be thicker than the standard 2.5" slot (7 or 9 mm). Which
is why they are only sold as external drives. You can't fit one in a laptop or
third-party 2.5" enclosure.

The one you linked to is 20.5 mm thick and weighs 540 g including the
enclosure. I'm not even sure whether there's a single 4 TB drive in there,
since a pair of 2 TB, 7 mm Seagate drives would be both thinner and lighter.

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kalleboo
Looks like the drive inside it is 15mm thick
[http://www.seagate.com/products/laptop-mobile-
storage/laptop...](http://www.seagate.com/products/laptop-mobile-
storage/laptop-internal-drives/laptop-hdd/?sku=ST4000LM016)

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narrator
At 255mb/s will take about 13.7 hours to write the whole drive.

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frozenport
Dont forget that the inside is half the speed of the outside.

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agumonkey
Looking at the page I remembered the first HDD I even bought: a 13GB from IBM
(before the deathstar chapter). Coming from a 1GB drive, I thought this thing
would never be filled. Didn't took long before I revise my billgatey
judgement.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
Interestingly I think the typical usage on a single drive for the average user
has topped out at about 1-2 TB over the past few years. Unless you are a
supreme data hoarder this is more than enough to handle the typical user’s OS,
all of it’s software and a decent collection of media (TV, music, movies) in
respectable quality. This idea goes a bit out the window if you are talking
about ultra high quality media of course, but for me (and I think most average
users) 1080p for movies/TV and v0/320kbps level quality for music is more than
sufficient.

We will eventually reach the limit on what the human body can perceive in
terms of audio and video quality (if we haven’t already yet, I know it’s quite
debatable whether there is a perceptible difference between v0 and FLAC for
instance) and that coupled with the amount of media a human can reasonably
consume in a lifetime might sort of put a cap on the amount of storage needed
by the typical consumer. This is of course assuming no new technology like
IPFS comes along that might incentivize storing other people’s data or some
other similar radical technological innovation.

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aidenn0
Video resolutions have not yet peaked though; most people don't have 4k media,
but 4k TVs are becoming more and more popular. This is counterbalanced by the
fact that people have netflix &c. rather than downloading movies. As internet
gets faster, and people get more devices, it makes less and less sense to
store things locally (you don't have 2TB of storage on your phone, so if
you're going to stream there, why not also stream to your pc?)

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e12e
4k isn't likely to be the peak, I'm guessing 360' video, and 2x4k stereoscopic
video will become normal too. And moving lightfield video, that can be
refocused at playback.

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jl6
Glad to see these making their way into retail channels. I've been a little
frustrated reading articles in the consumer press about HDDs which are only
ever shipped B2B.

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CSDude
I wonder what is the physical limit for 3.5" because my NAS has one slot left,
and I was about to buy an 10TB one.

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fnj
Physical? You _could_ jam a lot more storage in a 3.5" drive than you're ever
going to see, but it would not be economically practical, and the MTBF and
reliability would be very poor.

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ksec
Compared to our Data Growth, HDD capacity growth has been rather slow in
recent years. ( In terms of TB/Plate ) I thought DC were suppose to drive the
HAMR ( Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording )tech forward when the consumer space
is now in decline.

Or has the tech matured to the point, where even small and medium size company
are happy with these 12TB HDD, and larger HDD only mattered to a few such as
Google, Netflix, Amazon, Blackblaze, OVH, Microsoft and Apple etc.

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mike503
Only 550TB yearly rated load? That seems low. Less than 50x the size of the
drive. Maybe that's normal but that just seems very odd to me.

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kyriakos
how hot will this run?

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jordiburgos
OK, now it can hold all my node_modules folder.

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shmerl
Is it very noisy?

