
HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive - Amorymeltzer
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/hgst-releases-helium-filled-10tb-hard-drive-seagate-twiddles-shingled-fingers/
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rsync
As a provider of cloud storage (who actually owns the infrastructure) this is
both exciting and frustrating...

Exciting because we love the idea of deploying a 450TB zpool in a 4U chassis
...

Frustrating because we will have to keep reworking our price per GB.

With that in mind, our new attic/borg[1] support has dropped down to 3 cents
per GB, per month to kind-of-sort-of match S3 pricing[2].

[1] [http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-
backups/](http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/)

[2]
[http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html](http://www.rsync.net/products/attic.html)

~~~
JungleGymSam
> If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You.

Hey, thanks! I stopped reading there. :)

~~~
rsync
We both win!

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PhantomGremlin
I agree with this.

However, it would be nice to know a little about the company. I perused your
website, but didn't see any pages about the company history and current
employees. Did I miss that? I did finally see the "CEO page", but it doesn't
seem to be linked from the main page. It also appears to be something a
technical person _shows_ their CEO, rather than something that is _about_ the
CEO of rsync.net. I also didn't even see a physical address displayed
anywhere.

Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't feel comfortable dealing with such a black
box business situation.

Perhaps you need to add a second disclaimer?

    
    
       If you want to know who you're doing business with,
       our product is Not for You.

~~~
rsync
We just redesigned our website and I guess our old "about" page didn't make it
in the redeploy.

FWIW, I'm John Kozubik, owner and founder, and we started offering this
service in 2001 as an add-on to JohnCompanies colocation (the first VPS
provider)[1][2]. We spun rsync.net out as a standalone entity in 2006.

Address is 524 San Anselmo Ave., Suite 107, San Anselmo, CA 94960. Although
data is housed in either San Diego, Fremont, Denver, Zurich or Hong Kong
datacenters.

[1] Yes, really.

[2] We called them "server instances" \- someone else coined "VPS" and it
stuck.

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miahi
The great thing is that it doesn't use SMR. I have an 8TB SMR from Seagate and
its write performance is bad and variable, much like the pre-TRIM SSDs. It's
ok if you write a lot of stuff and then just read it (you can get >100MB/s out
of it), but I often see small random writes (updates) at 3-4 IOPS, because it
has to re-shingle the whole track.

~~~
praseodym
They're also terrible in RAID environments:
[http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb](http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb)

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sageabilly
I wonder if these will be recoverable by traditional data recovery means, or
if opening them and exposing the platters to normal air instead of helium
would mean they can't spin/run correctly.

If helium-filled HDD technology becomes more widespread I am curious about the
potential impact to the data recovery market.

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lallysingh
You could always open them in a larger helium chamber.

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sageabilly
Which would add a significant up-front cost that would have to be shouldered
by the data recovery company. Potentially an issue for small shops (which most
data recovery companies are.)

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samstave
Get one of those vacuum sealing luggage bags, cut holes in side and glue in
some rubber gloves into these holes. Put drive and tools in. Vacuum seal it,
then Fill with helium you get from the party store.

Wear gloves, pickup tools and dismantle drive.

~~~
dogma1138
Or just buy a biosaftey glovebox they start around the 2000$ mark
[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nuaire-NU-704-300-Biological-
Isolati...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nuaire-NU-704-300-Biological-Isolation-
Safety-Cabinet-3-Glove-
Box-/141559481390?hash=item20f59a442e:g:8tMAAOSw0e9UzACN)

And pressurize it with helium or a noble gas.

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TheOtherHobbes
How well have the first generations of helium drives lasted?

I'm wary of trusting my data to something that relies on incredibly good gas
seals. But if there are no observed reliability issues, it seems that problem
has been solved.

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dangrossman
They come with a 5 year warranty and 2.5M hours MTBF rating, which says
something about the manufacturer's opinion of their reliability.

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chefkoch
That hasn't really helped the 3TB seagate constellation drives...

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davidandgoliath
Seagate has really gone downhill in that respect, though it's worth noting
their enterprise grade stuff is still reasonable (ymmv).

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hga
You mean their almost certainly doomed by flash drive 10K and 15K drives? (A
class of drive I've been using since 1995 and just stopped buying new ones; in
fact, a 15K Savio mirrored system disk recently failed and I replaced both
with an Intel enterprise SSD rather than send it in for warranty repair. So
far I'm not looking back.)

Officially, Constellation drives are "Enterprise", 5 year warranty (which
still works well, did that on a 2TB drive last year I think), available in SAS
as well as SATA interfaces. Although they're now saying that you shouldn't
transfer more than 550TB of data per year through the best of this class of
drives.

~~~
chefkoch
In a 8 disk nas i replaced 6 oft them in one year because of bad smart data.
Some lastet only Werks before marked as faulty. This series is really bad.

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rusbus
Can someone comment as to why it needs to be filled with helium?

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pinewurst
Lower air resistance/friction and lower turbulence for the heads.

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ishansharma
So, what will happen if it leaks? Will it just get slow or stop working?

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thrownaway2424
It will probably stop working. Aerodynamics are crucial to the way a hard disk
works. One cannot not simply increase the density of the gas inside the drive
by 10x and expect it to continue working.

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ck2
Isn't helium guaranteed to leak out over time because of the tiny atom size,
giving these drives a most certain scheduled death?

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ScottBurson
"Guaranteed" is too strong a word, but I'm sure that engineering a seal that
would hold reliably for years and could be mass-produced was a nontrivial
problem. This is why everyone isn't already using helium.

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jjcm
I think these are gonna be too little too late for the platter drive market,
especially with SSD capacities skyrocketing recently (thank you 3D NAND).
Toshiba and Samsung both have announced plans for 128TB SSDs within the next 3
years - I can't really see platter drives competing with that.

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fapjacks
Great. One more drain on our Helium supply.

~~~
danieltillett
Better than party balloons. Where is the hedge fund investing in long term
storage of helium?

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garblegarble
I thought that was the problem with helium, it's hard to store because it
leaks through everything so easily

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danieltillett
The USG had/has a store the National Helium Reserve [1]. It was being sold off
so I am unsure how much is still in it, but to answer your question you store
it underground.

Edit. It looks that the National Helium reserve will be sold off by 2018 [2].

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_United_States)

~~~
garblegarble
Fascinating, thanks for the detail!

