Sign in / up

back to article Toshiba crams 14TB into another helium drive, this time with SAS boost

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 …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. jelabarre59

    pitch

    So when the helium-filled drive starts failing, only your dog will be able to hear the bearings squealing?

    11 0 Reply
    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Re: pitch

      Yes. And it's important to use all 4 screws to attach it into the enclosure, or else it'll float away.

      Ah, the nostalgic sight of small children skipping through the park, each clutching a SAS drive bobbing away on the end of its data cable...

      14 0 Reply
    2. Joeman
      Reply Icon

      Re: pitch

      ever seen a deflated helium party balloon? thats what these drives will look like as the helium leaks out..

      1 0 Reply
  2. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    FAIL

    Bah!

    In addition to throughput, where are the rotational speed, IOPS, and seek latency numbers?

    1 1 Reply
    1. Tom 38
      Reply Icon

      Re: Bah!

      If you're interested in those attributes, this probably isn't what you're looking for...

      9 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    what?

    weren't we promised 60TB solid state drives by now, a couple of years ago?

    5 0 Reply
    1. ivan5
      Reply Icon

      Re: what?

      Maybe but the question is how many body parts would be required to purchase one?

      5 0 Reply
    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: what?

      You can get a 400GB Micro SD card, so you should be able to fit 150 of them plus associated circuitry into the space filled by a 3.5" hard drive? The cost would be somewhere north of £22,500 though.

      5 0 Reply
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: what?

      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.

      3 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I am not sure why a drive that has spinning disks neets dual SATA3/6 GB data transfer connectivity when it is still not able to exceed SATA 1 data rates.

    7 0 Reply
    1. tip pc Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Paris Hilton

      @ac

      "I am not sure why a drive that has spinning disks neets dual SATA3/6 GB data transfer connectivity when it is still not able to exceed SATA 1 data rates."

      i was thinking exactly the same,

      2 0 Reply
    2. Mephistro
      Reply Icon

      "...not able to exceed SATA 1 data rates."

      Not when working alone, but several of them in a RAID...

      1 0 Reply
    3. Tom 38
      Reply Icon

      In terms of data rate of a single drive it doesn't, SAS offers many advantages over SATA when dealing with many disks, particularly multipath, better data recovery, talking the same protocol from controller to enclosure to disk and not having to use Serial ATA Tunnelling Protocol.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Mephistro
        Reply Icon

        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.

        0 0 Reply
    4. Korev Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      "I am not sure why a drive that has spinning disks neets dual SATA3/6 GB data transfer connectivity when it is still not able to exceed SATA 1 data rates."

      But if you employ SAS in your datacentre then you can take advantage of special forces

      3 0 Reply
  5. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

    Helium?

    Isnt that the gas thats pretty hard to keep in? How long will one of these drives last?

    4 0 Reply
    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Helium?

      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.

      4 0 Reply
  6. Steve Todd

    Very light duty cycle

    550TB/year works out to less than 4% of the time spent reading.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Korev Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Very light duty cycle

      I guess these discs are aimed at archiving etc.

      1 0 Reply
  7. ntevanza

    We can rebuild him

    I make that out to be about a 45 hour real world rebuild time. I don't think I'm that brave.

    1 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

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

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like