back to article He He He: Seagate's gasbag Exos spinner surges up to 14TB

Seagate has unveiled a 14TB helium-filled disk drive in the Exos line. The range appeared in November when various Enterprise Capacity and Enterprise Performance drives in 3.5 and 2.5-inch form factors were rebranded. The range topped out with the Exos X12, a rebranded Enterprise Capacity 12TB helium-filled spinner. Now we …

  1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Moore's Law will catch up with hard drives. You'll either have to increase the drive's height for more platters, or you'll have to go all solid state for more memory per square mm...

    Reminds me of full-height HDD's of 80Mb in storage size...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It seems to be a while off yet though.

  2. seven of five

    1PB of capacity in a rack

    make that 6PB:

    60 drives interface down per 4U, times 10 for a 42U rack= 600 drives, 6+2 raid6, 8 hot spare, 74 sets of 84TB base 10, 6.2 PByte.

    Weight might be an issue, though...

    1. Aaron 10
      Angel

      Re: 1PB of capacity in a rack

      But... but they're filled with helium!

    2. defiler

      Re: 1PB of capacity in a rack

      Hell, even hotswap - 21 x 2U x 12 spindles = 252 x 14TB drives. That's 3.5PB right there. That's a lot of RAID.

      1. seven of five

        Re: 1PB of capacity in a rack

        The 60 drive enclosures are hotswap as well, you just have to pull out an entire shelf and open the lid. No fun on U36-40. btdt and didn´t tip the rack.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: for the cost of a tape to copy them to and delivery.

      Storage systems of that size use Erasure Coding rather than RAID

      1. defiler
        Coat

        Re: for the cost of a tape to copy them to and delivery.

        Erasure Coding

        Guess I'll have to give a little respect to them...

        Alright. I'm leaving.

    4. Solviva

      Re: 1PB of capacity in a rack

      60? Try 90 in a Supermicro 4U Chassis... that's assuming they'll sell it to you.

    5. ExpatZ

      Re: 1PB of capacity in a rack

      At those sizes just use Ceph and you'll get to use more disk, have a safer storage setup and quicker recovery times after a disk fail.

  3. POSitality

    Limits?

    I'm thinking the limit for "classical physics" would be one atom per bit. How close are we?

    1. Martin Gregorie

      Re: Limits?

      Not even close to hawg-calling distance.

      1. MonkeyBob

        Re: Limits?

        Not even close to DNA, which packs about 3 billion base pairs* into every cell in your body. 2 bits per base is 6 Gigabits or 0.75 Gigabytes. About 20,000 of these will be over 14TB which using blood cells would be about 2,000,000 cubic micro metres or 0.002 cubic millimetres. So not even close to a drop of blood yet.

        *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome

        **http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-human-cell/

        1. Allan George Dyer

          Re: Limits?

          Except that red blood cells have no nucleus and there aren't many white blood cells in comparison. I don't have the figures to say you're wrong about the drop of blood... how big a drop is it?

          1. MonkeyBob
            Paris Hilton

            Re: Limits?

            Good point about the red blood cells. They are about 3 times bigger than a sperm cell and they definatly have DNA. Icon cos she throw more "data" around than any tech firm.

    2. cloudguy

      Re: Limits?

      Well, last year IBM scientists demonstrated the ability to store 1-bit of data on a single atom and read it under laboratory conditions. Currently, it takes 100K atoms to store 1-bit of data.

  4. defiler

    That's a lot of space...

    Meanwhile, in SSD land, 30TB in a 3.5" drive. However, I expect I wouldn't see much change out of my mortgage for that kind of nonsense...

    Still, it appears that the sweet spot for SATA is still 4TB (although I see Ebuyer listing 8TB at £173).

    I remember my friends marvelling at my 540MB drive that I got for only £153+VAT. And it feels like yesterday.

    1. Horridbloke

      Re: That's a lot of space...

      "540MB drive that I got for only £153+VAT."

      I'm going to guess that at late 1994 / early 1995.

      1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

        Re: That's a lot of space...

        Quite.

        I got myself a nice Seagate 250Mb HDD (upgrade from a dinky 40Mb). Lovely. OS/2 Warp liked the bigger space too.

        Couple of days later the 500Mb was the price of a 250Mb.

        I was so pissed.

      2. defiler

        Re: That's a lot of space...

        I'm going to guess that at late 1994 / early 1995.

        Not far wrong. Christmas 1993. I think it was from Admincure. P90 with 16MB of RAM. People thought I was mental.

        Then in 1994 I put OS/2 Warp on it, and people thought I was mental.

        Later I got a 2x CD writer that took caddies, gold CDs at £10 a pop at the time, and would fail if the screensaver cut in, and people thought I was mental.

        Then I bought an Orchid Monster 3D (<click>) - that showed them!

        1. Horridbloke

          Re: That's a lot of space...

          "Christmas 1993. I think it was from Admincure. P90 with 16MB of RAM. People thought I was mental."

          That truly was mental at the time. Good show.

          1. defiler

            Re: That's a lot of space...

            That truly was mental at the time. Good show.

            I was the only person I know who could play Magic Carpet in 640x480! Worth every penny.

            Also, a few months later I found that the "reserved" jumper on my Intel Plato board cranked it up to a mind-blistering 100MHz!!!

            Kids these days - they'll never understand the efforts we went to for an extra 10MHz...

    2. bondyboy

      Re: That's a lot of space...

      Yes 4TB is the current sweet spot but the 6TB WD red drives are going for £169.04, by my reckoning that gives a £28.17 price per TB - only marginally more than the £27.39 per TB that the same 4TB drive gives

      (been looking to upgrade the NAS drives this morning)

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: That's a lot of space...

      "I remember my friends marvelling at my 540MB drive that I got for only £153+VAT"

      Try a 120 for double that.....

      And I won't even mention how much I paid for a 2 speed CD-Writer, but the discs cost around £15 each and had about a 20% failure rate. THAT'S how you stop piracy....

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: That's a lot of space...

      Nimbus Data launched a 100TB SSD in a 3.5" form factor yesterday. It supposedly has unlimited write endurance during its 5 year warranty period too.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    too little, too expensive

    To shift from my 5 x 4TB (plus backup), I'd need two, if technology's mature enough, and my wallet deep enough. Sorry :/

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Explain?

    It's not explained in the article how an HDD gets shingles.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Coat

      Re: Explain?

      It tends to have had the Chicken-Pox in it's early life.

  7. chivo243 Silver badge
    Coat

    On helium?

    Shouldn't it be Hiii Hiii Hii like a chipmunk?

  8. Jaap Aap

    And when can we buy a drive with 3.5TB and two platters? Or 5.25TB and three platters?

  9. Titus Aduxass

    How big?!?!?

    Every time I read about the latest increase in disk drive capacity I'm reminded of the state-of-the-art disk drives when I first got into computing. The disk drives were about the size and shape of a washing machine (top loader) and a disk pack comprised platters each about the size of a 12" LP stacked about a foot high. The capacity?

    200MB

    -sigh-

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      And back then it was 200MB

      Not 200 million bits, which turns out to be only 190.7MB.

      Because in those days, marketing didn't dare open its mouth when engineers were speaking.

  10. mylittlepwny

    lol I wouldn't trust 14mb of data to a Seagate drive let alone terabytes...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "lol I wouldn't trust 14mb of data to a Seagate drive let alone terabytes..."

      Same here, used to only buy seagate years ago, moved to HGST, out of all the drives in my home NAS, the 22 x 4TB HGST drives I have only 1 has failed in the last 3 years. Out of the 6 x 1.5TB seagate drives over a 3 years period all 6 died. Out of 7 (plus 4 of the replacements) x 2TB segate drives over 4 years, 9 have failed.

      At work out of 50 of the 2TB seagates, only 10 are left working over 4 years also.

      1. Orv Silver badge

        HGST started as a merger of HItachi and IBM, who made the infamous "Deathstar" drives, some of the worst ever. Manufacturers have bad runs and good runs, and it's hard to draw any overall conclusions, in my experience.

        Personally I liked Western Digital, but I recognized even at the time that this was mostly superstition on my part. Now that they've merged with HGST I have yet to form a new preference for rotating drives. For SSDs I tend to feel like Intel is the best bet, Samsung is a budget choice, and everyone else isn't worth trusting my cat pictures to...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          I know they are and I know they do. I had the deathstars also. Had 2 x 75GXP's when the first one died the click of death, they replaced it with a 60GXP, how nice, giving me a smaller drive. When the second died, I complained, they gave me a 120GXP. They both died just over a year later with the click of death.

          Right now, until data proves otherwise (been using backblaze hard drive stats). I will use HGST for now, if other drives improve and I am unable to get more of these drives when I need more storage (or my experience of the drives change) I will change to another manufacturer.

      2. ExpatZ

        I'm working on a 4.7PB setup running Ceph ruight now, in 3 years we've lost 5 drives.

        That is because we use proper enterprise class drives from Seagate, that's 840 6GB spinners and only 5 dead.

        Lesson: if you like your data stay away from large consumer grade hard drives.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Helium leakage

    Is pumping drives with helium another way of introducing obsolescence? Seagate drives always fail faster than they should, even without leakage, and isn't there a worldwide helium shortage anyway?

    1. Orv Silver badge

      Re: Helium leakage

      The helium is in there because it's less dense than air, reducing friction and hence heat and power consumption. Since the whole point is low density, I imagine it's at 1 atm or less, so the worst case would be air mixes in and makes the drive gradually run hotter. For cleanliness reasons drives are normally sealed anyway, so I don't see this being a big problem.

      The helium shortage has been wildly overstated: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/

      Most helium comes from natural gas wells, and until recently prices were so low that most gas producers didn't bother to separate it out -- even though removing the non-flammable helium improved the heating value of the gas. It just wasn't worth enough to be worth the trouble. The reason for the depressed prices was the US selling off its massive, 1920s-era helium reserve. So when the reserve started to get low, people worried that there was no production capacity in place to replace it -- and then the blockade of Qatar precipitated a minor panic because it temporarily cut off about 30% of the worldwide supply.

  12. Francis Boyle Silver badge

    About time too

    That VR porn nature documentaries takes up a lot of space.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like