back to article Whoosh, there it is: Toshiba bods say 14TB helium-filled disk is coming soon

Toshiba stand staff at the Huawei Connect conference 2017 in Shanghai said a 14TB helium-filled disk drive would arrive "very soon". They confirmed that meant before the end of the year. Such a capacity would leapfrog Seagate's 12TB helium-filled drive. Currently Toshiba's largest disk drive, the MN series NAS drive, holds …

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    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Re: Helium Glut

      Natural gas straight from the well is about 2% helium. The market for helium is so small that most natural gas suppliers do not bother to collect and sell it.

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Helium

    Perfect for getting to the cloud(s)

  2. Stevie

    Bah!

    On the plus side, faults now telegraphed by munchkin-voice in the machine room.

  3. Graham Cobb Silver badge

    I don't believe them

    Two manufacturers announced 12TB He drives about New Year, saying they would be available mid-2017. Then 3-4 months ago they announced they were now available. Except they aren't. You can't buy them anywhere, that I can find.

    A couple of suppliers have had them listed for a couple of months, but with no stock and no sign of when they will receive any stock. For the last month or so I have been checking major retailers and even comparison sites almost daily but no one has any available (even though the couple of sites that list them keep changing their prices slightly every day).

    So, I don't believe these 14TB drives will be available by the end of the year.

    1. td97402

      Re: I don't believe them

      All going to data centers in case lots. No 14TB drives for you.

  4. krf

    How about a floppy?

    I spent a thousand dollars $US on a Thinkertoy floppy drive back about '78. It was the size of a small toolbox and used a single sided floppy that held 256k. And I loved it. Before that the only storage was cassette tape which was barfo slow.

    I tried to calculate how many floppies equals 14tb but the calculator overflowed.

    Thinking back, I have no idea where my young self came up with a grand for the purchase. About four thousand today and probably a good part of a years salary then. I must have held up a liquor store while blind drunk.

  5. Tubz Silver badge
    Gimp

    That's a lot of pron storage, going to have a sore wrist and tennis elbow !

  6. John F***ing Stepp

    And the Windows 20 build will only take half a disk!

    Future proof!

  7. Permidion

    Meanwhile, common mortal..

    buy 4TB disk, because thats where the best TB/price ratio is at the moment.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Meanwhile, common mortal..

      But for many, not big enough anymore.

  8. cloudguy

    No RAID rebuilds on large HDDs

    The first cry you hear with the announcement of an even larger capacity HDD is that it will be impossible to use them in a RAID array due to an almost infinite amount of time needed for a RAID rebuild. Get a clue. These helium-filled HDDs are destined to be deployed in object-based storage clusters where single or multiple drive failures have no effect on the operational status of the cluster. Failed of disabled HDDs in object-based storage clusters are just pulled and replaced, hopefully under warranty.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No RAID rebuilds on large HDDs

      But doesn't that still entail some kind of rebuilding process whereby lost redundancy is restored, which still takes time and is limited by the throughput of the drive? Meaning the cluster is still vulnerable to another failure during the rebuild such that objects get lost past their redundancy limit?

      1. cloudguy

        Re: No RAID rebuilds on large HDDs

        Well, not rebuild in the RAID controller sense. In an object storage cluster data is protected using replication (copies) of data objects or erasure coding (data fragments + parity fragment) of data objects to achieve the desired level of data durability. In most object storage clusters replication and erasure coding policies can be specified at the "bucket" level. Replication typically defaults to three replicas with one replica stored on three different nodes in the cluster. Erasure coding schemes can vary considerably in their combination of data fragments and parity fragments, but the fragments themselves are dispersed to a number of nodes in the cluster so that no node has more than a single fragment (data or parity). HDD failure in a given node means the replicas and parity fragments stored on the failed HDD will be re-created by the object-based storage software on other HDDs in the cluster. At no time will the replicated or erasure coded data become inaccessible while this happens.

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