
Seagate Announces 12 TB HDD: 2nd-Gen Helium-Filled HDD - M_Grey
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11199/seagate-announces-enterprise-capacity-v7-12-tb-hdd
======
bigiain
Of course, Im gonna need three, because backing one of these up to the cloud
from my home adsl would take (tap tap tap, calculate) 3.5 _years!_ (sorry
cperciva, not gonna tarsnap this even at picodollars per gigabyte!)

(fortunately, it'd only take 3-4 months to bittorrent down all those, ummm,
linux ISOs...)

~~~
comboy
> sorry cperciva, not gonna tarsnap this even at picodollars per gigabyte!

Oh, I would, but I guess you meant per byte.

At current rates it's $3K monthly to keep a backup of this HDD on tarsnap and
that's not including bandwidth. That's six 10TB drives.

I don't mean to discourage from tarsnap though. Cloud storage is unfortunately
still pretty expensive, and most people are probably only truly paranoid about
much less than 1GB of their data.

~~~
kristofferR
Why don't just use Arq (encrypted cloud backups for Win+MacOS, $49) and Amazon
Cloud Storage (unlimited storage for $59 a year)?

I've got terabytes backed up, no issues at all.

~~~
comboy
Because I had no idea about this Amazon unlimited Cloud Storage, thanks! Need
to read the fine print though, home DB snapshots forever sounds really great.
Plus there's not much to save space on their side if I encrypt them first. But
even without it, I trust Amazon to keep my photos secure more than I trust
CrashPlan which already have lost my data once (yes I think it's worth
repeating, and no it was not PEBKAC, they admitted it and all they could do
about it was "sorry").

edit: I wonder if Amazon goal with this was to get their hands on as many
photos with their full metadata as possible (for training).

~~~
throwaway7767
Interesting. Was this data loss of CrashPlan announced publicly? Did it affect
more users?

It's concerning to hear, since I know people using it for backups.

~~~
comboy
I'm not aware of it. But you know, in some other company (don't even know
which) I remember a story where after the data loss the CEO contacted the user
and tried to do whatever he can including sending hard drives to speed up
uploading new copies.

In my case it was 90GB, a whole single machine. The fact that they were pretty
causal about it, is worrying. But I still use them for some use cases because
they have unlimited storage with software for Linux, although I don't depend
on them.

Quote from the support ticket:

"I have looked again for your data, but we are unable to locate the archive
anywhere in our system.

I am sincerely sorry that we have let you down as there is not a reason that I
can find that this data should not be here.

If there is anything that I can to for you, please do not hesitate to ask and
I will do so."

------
cobookman
Seagate also has a 60TB SSD: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-
unveils-60tb...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-
ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/)

~~~
cowardlydragon
What can they fit in a 5.25" enclosure?

I always wished a 5.25 mass storage HDD would come back on the market. How
much would those hold relative to this?

Hm, I'm guessing about 2.5x more data per platter, about 50% more platters...
45GB?

~~~
Dylan16807
Just put more drives into the box. You don't want bigger disks because of how
fast they spin.

The only 'obvious' improvement you can make is having more arms or figuring
out some way of micro-aligning multiple heads at the same time on a single
arm. There's not much benefit from larger single units.

~~~
choward
SSDs spin?

~~~
Dylan16807
The post I replied to was about hard drives.

You can already fit way too much SSD into a 3.5 inch drive, and nobody will
ever buy it because they want more ports and performance per dollar. There's
no benefit for either technology to go up to 5.25 inches.

------
boxcardavin
Any sense of how much helium will permeate through the grain structure of the
drive enclosure during its lifetime?

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Does helium go through metal?

~~~
astrodust
No seal is ever perfect, that's the concern. Plus helium, being monatomic, is
able to jam into tinier holes than things like oxygen, nitrogen, or water
vapour.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I've asked people who used the first gen He drives because it's an obvious
worry, and the consensus seems to be that they're at least as reliable as
conventional drives. MTBF doesn't seem unusually bad, and can even be better
than some trad designs.

~~~
Nition
This is different than the typical failure scenario though, isn't it?

You might have a few drives with bad seals that fail early. But say the
majority are sealed properly, but the helium still leaks out at x small rate
over time, you might have almost all the drives suddenly fail at around the
same time after say 6 years or whatever.

I don't think you can really know if they're truly reliable in that sense
until you can take one that's been sitting one in a drawer for 10 years and
plug it in.

~~~
astrodust
A company like Backblaze is bound to find out before the consumers do but I
have a feeling it'll be fine. Keeping gas inside of something isn't much
harder than keeping it sealed enough that dust stays out.

A high-altitude environment might put more pressure on the seals than other
places, that _could_ shorten the life-span, but other than that it shouldn't
be a huge deal. Most drives have a commercial life-span of no more than 4-6
years anyway. After that you're on borrowed time.

------
cowardlydragon
EIGHT platters? More platters more failures and heat, isn't that right? Or
does He change the equation on that?

~~~
nradov
Helium is an excellent thermal conductor so it should move the heat around
pretty well.

~~~
kazinator
Interesting: found this table:

[http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-
d_429...](http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_429.html)

Big difference between different gases.

But, check this out. Helium also has a high heat capacity. Table on same
website:

[http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-
gas...](http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-gases-
d_159.html)

Six times the conductivity of nitrogen (0.142 to 0.024) and five times the
heat capacity: 5.19 to 1.04.

Big conductivity and capacity should translate to "convective cooling monster
gas". :)

~~~
NateyJay
This is misleading. Helium has a higher conductivity and heat capacity than
nitrogen _per unit mass_ , but since helium has such low density, the heat
capacity and conductivity per unit volume at atmospheric pressure is less than
nitrogen.

~~~
jdietrich
While it's true that helium will have a lower practical heat capacity due to
lower density, it still has far higher thermal conductivity than air at the
same pressure.

[http://www.engineersedge.com/heat_transfer/thermal-
conductiv...](http://www.engineersedge.com/heat_transfer/thermal-conductivity-
gases.htm)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Why does this chart show nitrogen < helium while the other is opposite?

------
killjoywashere
I know a few folks who use these, their applications usually involve a lot of
them, high in the atmosphere (in flight or remote observatories on
mountaintops) where downlink is prohibitive. Any other realistic use cases?
Undersea maybe? But space isn't at quite such a premium there.

~~~
deftnerd
Delimiter has $10/mo "bring your own drive" storage plans. Just buy this drive
and ship it to them and share it with a VPS or cheap server there and you can
store a lot of media for a cloud Plex server

~~~
yourapostasy
When I looked [1], it reads as if they have an 8 TB cap on this service. That
is, you can ship them any drive, up to 8 TB, to plug in and run at $10 per
month. It sounds like their pricing is predicated on some kind of assumed
Watt-hours per TB.

It would be interesting if someone offered a similar plan, but priced on
energy consumed instead, giving incentive for managed storage arrays that
power down drives that idle (for some algorithmically-derived definition of
"idle", trading off against projected lifespan of the device due to increased
power cycling), and other energy-saving practices. Slices up the granularity
of cloud hosting even finer.

[1] [https://www.delimiter.com/slot-hosting/](https://www.delimiter.com/slot-
hosting/)

------
myrandomcomment
Hum. I am thinking about ordering a new FreeNAS Mini (the 8 bay one). I was
going to get the 6TB drives....

So right now I have 3 copies of everything.

1\. Masters are on 4 bay FreeNAS mini (ZFS baby!) 2\. Rsync to Thunderbolt
drive on desktop (well laptop but...TB monitor with drive attached). 3\.
Everything goes up to Backblaze auto-magicly.

~~~
matthew-wegner
I guess you might be buying something for your desk/living space if you're
thinking of something that small.

But if you aren't (or for others who might be reading this), that's a crazy
price.

In case noise and idle power consumption aren't as big of an issue:

You can get a 12-bay Supermicro with two six-core CPUs + 48GB and 12 HDD bays
for <$400 shipped:
[http://www.ebay.com/itm/2U-Supermicro-12-Bay-826TQ-R800-Serv...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/2U-Supermicro-12-Bay-826TQ-R800-Server-X8DTN-2x-Xeon-E5645-Six-
Core-48GB-Rail-/132098335210)

Or the very popular SA120 DAS for <$300 to hang 12 bays off another machine
(Dell R210II is quiet and cheap): [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-70F10000UX-
THINKSERVER-SA120-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-70F10000UX-THINKSERVER-
SA120-DIRECT-ATTACHED-STORAGE-1-I-O-MODULE-12-X-D-/162356290095)

(Random eBay links I found just now, have no affiliation with either of them)

~~~
myrandomcomment
Well it is for my office / man cave. I have a 19" telco rack in the corner
that has as switch, the mini and a box running proxmox running VMs (minecraft
server, work testing VMs, etc.). My startup buys from IxSystems for all or our
stuff so I hope to get a good discount. My current 4 bay I have had for 4
years and it just works. Also the support from IxSystems has been great. I
have spent so much of my life build data centers and networks, et.al. that
just paying for something that works has a great deal of appeal. In 1998-2001
the rack has a ton of systems, switches and routers, now I guess I would just
trade $ to spend time with the family. If I am going to build anything it will
be a new Ryzen gaming setup.

------
wfunction
Tangential question: What's the absolute cheapest storage per byte right now
for someone who doesn't care about speed? Is it like a 4TB HDD? Any specific
examples would be appreciated.

~~~
moe
> 4TB HDD

Yes. It's what Amazon Glacier runs on:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier#Storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Glacier#Storage)

The Backblaze blog is also a great place to learn about a large storage
deployment: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-
stats-20...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/)

~~~
wfunction
Thanks! Side question, but how is Amazon Glacier consdiered affordable? For
4TB it costs $192/year... yet you could buy two 4TB HDDs at that price
yourself and use one for redundancy and the other for immediate retrieval.
What's the benefit of putting your data on Glacier when it costs twice as much
as keeping it yourself, and probably takes longer to retrieve too?

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

~~~
yk
It is offsite storage. If you store your backups all in the same place, then
something may happen to the place like fire, flood or burglars.

~~~
wfunction
But can't you put your own hard disks offsite somewhere? Just because you're
holding your own backups that doesn't mean you have to be keeping them at the
same location.

------
akandiah
What are the downsides of Helium when it comes to data recovery? If it comes
down to the click-of-death, surely a traditional clean-room set-up won't work.

~~~
rzzzt
A sealed box with glove access could be filled with Helium.

Edit: apparently it's not easy even to take the lid off of these drives :) See
[https://youtu.be/ANMtvYnI1gQ](https://youtu.be/ANMtvYnI1gQ)

------
excalibur
Good thing there isn't a global shortage of extractable helium.

~~~
jessriedel
There isn't. There is a robust market in Helium, and its price represents the
cost of bothering to recover the large quantities that are produced (and
generally vented) as a by product of oil extraction. We could have much more
helium if we wanted to pay for it, but it's not worth it.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/18/were-
rea...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/18/were-really-not-
about-to-run-out-of-helium-no-please-stop-it-were-not/#6f6f3ade13b6)

[https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-
in...](https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/)

> In 2014, the US Department of Interior estimated that there are 1,169
> billion cubic feet of helium reserves left on Earth. That’s enough for about
> 117 more years.

~~~
dajohnson89
I would consider 117 years a pretty significant shortage.

~~~
jandrese
Maybe in 100 years we will have fusion power plants everywhere producing
Helium. :)

We will need something because fossil fuels are not sustainable. In 100 years
we should be pumping much less oil than we do today. This also means finding
substitutes for all of the byproducts of oil production.

~~~
XorNot
Fusion plants in the 1GW range will have at most a couple of grams of fuel in
them at any given time (though looks like ITER expects to use 250 KG per year
collectively - still though, not a lot).

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sytelus
I'd few of 8GB ones and they were truely horrible. They ran super slow and
then to top it of they started making noises with very light usage within
months. I'm just not sure how reliable these are...

~~~
drivethrowinguy
Are you sure that you had Seagate EC drives, and not Seagate Archive drives?
The latter are DM-SMR and therefore poorly suited to pretty much anything
doing random write I/O (e.g. rsyncing directory trees, rdiff-backup and so
on). However, with the correct workload (object store, log-oriented storage)
they perform admirably, especially for their price.

With DM-SMR strange noises and paranormal drive activity has to be expected
since the drive can spend considerable time flushing it's PMR buffer (~16 GiB)
to the shingled zones.

------
logicallee
If I'm reading this right the rated workload is 45 writes of the whole disk
per year[1]. Is that right? That does not seem to be a high degree of
confidence by them....

[1] I divided the rated workload listed on the page by the size of the disk.

------
wazoox
I don't know about the Seagate, but the HGST He drives are super reliable.
I've been using them since they exist (3 years) in growing numbers (several
hundreds) and I'm still waiting for the first one to fail.

