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So when the helium-filled drive starts failing, only your dog will be able to hear the bearings squealing?
Toshiba has added a helium-filled 3.5-inch form factor SAS disk drive alongside its equivalent SATA product. Like the SATA-using MG07ACA, the catchily named MG07SCA comes with 12 and 14TB capacities but uses a dual-port 12Gbit/s SAS interface instead of the 6Gbit/s SATA link. The MG07ACA has already spawned an MN07 NAS drive …
You can get a 100TB 3.5" SSD from Nimbus. The 14TB Tosh rustdrive is designed for incredibly light usage compared to the Nimbus, but then of course it's bound to cost far, far less.
That said, the ruler format looks as though it will be the way to go for very high SSD capacities in the enterprise.
I was thinking of RAID boxes with their own SATA controller for for its own disks and an external SATA link with the host system. For that specific use case it would make sense, I think. I've never worked with such systems, but I remember reading about them and they sounded nice and not as expensive as SAS.
Helium is difficult to contain, which is why He drives took a lot of R&D but it worked. MTBF increased by a factor of 2 to 6 (depending on what you compared against). These are now real results from field tests, not guesses for a new product.
Air drives are not sealed. They have an air filter that can fail. They also suffer in humid environments. Air gets turbulent more easily, wobbles the heads and vibrates the platters as well as raising the temperature.
If a Helium drive leaks there will be a detectable change in pressure so there will be some warning before failure - but I would not bet on getting the 16 hours warning required to image the whole 14TB.