10TB helium drive

CougTek

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It's already available too. About 575U$ or 735$CDN. More expensive than the 6TB and 8TB per capacity, but not outrageously so. I don't know if the holes are placed differently than on the standard drives or if they are at odd positions like on the HGST Helium drive.

SATA only so far, no SAS.
 

LunarMist

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It's already available too. About 575U$ or 735$CDN. More expensive than the 6TB and 8TB per capacity, but not outrageously so. I don't know if the holes are placed differently than on the standard drives or if they are at odd positions like on the HGST Helium drive.

SATA only so far, no SAS.

Are these as good as the 8TB He8? Price is about the same.
 

CougTek

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Speed-wise, probably. There's no reason they wouldn't equal or even surpass (albeit just a little) the HGST He drives.

Regarding reliability, it's too soon to tell. Seagate, however, doesn't have a track record as good as HGST on that front. I'd still buy those, mainly because they are easier to find and at least 20% cheaper than the HGST Helium drives.
 

LunarMist

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Speed-wise, probably. There's no reason they wouldn't equal or even surpass (albeit just a little) the HGST He drives.

Regarding reliability, it's too soon to tell. Seagate, however, doesn't have a track record as good as HGST on that front. I'd still buy those, mainly because they are easier to find and at least 20% cheaper than the HGST Helium drives.

Perhaps I misunderstand, but isn't the Hitachi 8TB drive widely available while the Seagate 10TB drive is new and hard to find?
 

LunarMist

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There's just one problem. It's a Seagate. :bstd:

Why, is that bad? I spent a lot on all of the 10TB drives (meant to buy only one). HGST doesn't have them out yet.
The seven other Seagate drives in the computer have all been fine.
 
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CougTek

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...on ALL of the 10TB drives???

How many did you buy? Did you have a Ddrueding moment?

Regarding Seagate, I think their consumer drives are shit, but their enterprise drives are ok. If they were that bad, HP, Dell and others wouldn't put them in their servers with a rebranded sticker. There are a lot of HGST drivers in servers, but even more Seagate enterprise drives. I've never seen a rebranded Toshiba drive and I can't remember seeing a WD one either.
 

LunarMist

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It must have been the add to cart thing messed up. It's not a DD quantity but still I'm around $5K in the last 6 weeks on storage and still have to buy another NAS with more than 5 bays.
 

LunarMist

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It sure is a strange looking drive. The metal base has a striking silvery finish that is dissimilar from the full-sized shiny aluminum cover plate.

23-June-2016_NM0016.png
 

LunarMist

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Both are easily available here. The Seagate 10TB cost slightly less than the HGST 8TB. At least here.

The 8TB He8 is about $480 and the 10TB NM0016 is about $600, both in SATA. I suppose there may be some lower prices from less reliable sources.
 

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The 8TB He8 is about $480 and the 10TB NM0016 is about $600, both in SATA. I suppose there may be some lower prices from less reliable sources.

Those are both $60/TB, so not really a price difference at all.

EDIT: In fact, once you factor in the cost per port of whatever you are plugging them into the 10TB drives are cheaper.
 

LunarMist

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I will add the 3z10 and 8 for now. Maybe I'll reconsider in 2017. I expect a few weeks for the 831x availability. I already have a spare REd 8GB so that will house the RAID 6.
 
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CougTek

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The 8TB He8 is about $480 and the 10TB NM0016 is about $600, both in SATA. I suppose there may be some lower prices from less reliable sources.
Converting currency to U$ equivalent, the cheapest He8 I can find is ~505U$, but it's a SAS 12G model. The SATA 6G are all above 600U$.

Meanwhile, most stores sell the ST10000NM0016 for slightly more than 620U$, but I've found two or three online stores (reputable ones, not shaddy unknown stores) that let it go for ~585U$.
 

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A few stores claim to have the new He10 10TB for around $800. It not really worth that for my purposes.
 

CougTek

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I've seen the He10 part numbers float around at some stores, but no one has it in stock yet North of the border.
 

LunarMist

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I've seen the He10 part numbers float around at some stores, but no one has it in stock yet North of the border.

I suppose they all go to the high volume purchasers first.
I'm really enjoying the 10 helium drives so far. Though none are formally HGST, the WD are very similar.
He drives are very quiet and run cool. :) They can work just fine with minimal ventilation compared to the normal 7200 RPM drives.
 

LunarMist

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Those are both $60/TB, so not really a price difference at all.

EDIT: In fact, once you factor in the cost per port of whatever you are plugging them into the 10TB drives are cheaper.

Yes, and the larger drives will be useful longer. Now I am paranoid about the Amazons so options are more limited.
 

LunarMist

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You need to put them in a protective cage. Not for their protection, but yours.

Some of those drives look rather good, but I have no need for more at the moment. I wonder if the helium fill will extend to sub-6 platter models by next year.
One would think that 2016 hybrid drives would have more than 8GB of SSD, but perhaps the core of the Windows is only that size.
 

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I don't know about you guys, but I've been scratching my head at all of the lines. How thin can they dice this an have a meaningful difference between models?
 

LunarMist

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I don't know about you guys, but I've been scratching my head at all of the lines. How thin can they dice this an have a meaningful difference between models?

Even the cheaper ones are rated 10^-15 UER, so I probably would have used the Ironwood instead of the Enterprise Capacity. I'm not sure why the desktop version is more expensive since it lacks the vibration sensors and they are all 7200 RPM. The surveillance version has different firmware no doubt.
 

sechs

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Even the cheaper ones are rated 10^-15 UER, so I probably would have used the Ironwood instead of the Enterprise Capacity. I'm not sure why the desktop version is more expensive since it lacks the vibration sensors and they are all 7200 RPM. The surveillance version has different firmware no doubt.
I'm sure that each of the different models has a different firmware, but I'm not clear how many differences they can have.

I've been using Seagate surveillance drives in my NAS. Can't see any difference in performance versus consumer desktop drives. They do seem to be considerably more reliable
 

LunarMist

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I thought the surveillance drivers were mainly 5400/5900 RPM as well.
Since future drives will be filled with gas, we may see a return to an all 7200 RPM era.
 

sechs

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Seagate made both. For the new lines, they're all 7200RPM.

Turns out to be cheaper to only make one kind of drive...
 

LunarMist

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I thought I brought that one up in another thread. Before the Amazonian cluster****, I was going to buy one. The cost is the same as the Hitachi and the design looks about the same.
However, the UAE is only 10^-14 so I ordered the Hitachi/wire cable.

I read somewhere that the Hitachi 12 TB is coming.
 

sechs

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They're the same company, right?

So, WD just releases the crappier version under their own label
 

LunarMist

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For all I know it's the same drive with a different label.
 

jtr1962

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I agree with standardizing on one RPM to avoid having multiple product lines, but from where I stand we should be going to 5400 RPM or less, maybe even 3600 RPM, for power, noise, and reliability reasons. Large HDDs these days solely function as bulk storage where access times really don't matter. You can get higher bit densities with lower RPMs, so STRs shouldn't be affected at all. I just don't get the point of 7200 RPM. More noise, more heat, more chance of losing data. It seems drive manufacturers are still stuck in a pre-SSD mindset.
 

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The reason more capacity drives are returning to the 7200 RPM standard is that helium allows for lower power consumption/heat and they are relatively quiet as well.
Of course slower drives (5400-5900 RPM) use less power yet, but the power difference is not very much. The only reason I'm using the 5400 RPM 8TB drives is that they were available in the NAS class before the 7200 RPM drives were.
The difference in performance between 5400 and 7200 RPM is still quite noticeable with individual 8-10 TB drives. Access times and transfer rates matter as they always did for storage intensive tasks.
I suppose a storage system with a lot of RAM and SSD R/W buffer can mitigate that there is still a demand for local storage with speed.
 

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I just don't get the point of 7200 RPM.
Once again, you only see your little scope of use and try to apply it to an entire market. SMB-targeted NAS would be too slow with 5400rpm drives, let alone 3600rpm drives, to cope with the requests of several tens or a few hundred employees. 7200rpm drives are okfor that, when in sufficent number (5 to 12 drives RAID arrays). I kind of know; I manage several of those units for a conglomerate of 10 companies and several hundred employees. Others here can tell you the same.

An all-flash NAS will cost at least five times more, which most SMB cannot afford. There will be a time when SSD will be affordable enough to forget about mecanical drives, but this will be several years in the future.

You could also try to convince Nimble Storage's engineers to put 3600rpm mecanical drives in their SAN with a six-figure MSRP. I'm pretty sure you'd be met with a certain level of skepticism.

___________________________________________________
Regarding the Helium drives, the cheapest HGST He10 10TB I can find is a SAS 12G model (0F27352) and it cost ~870$CDN (660U$). The SATA models are all 15% more expensive. It's 20% more than the Seagate ST10000NM0016. I'm more confident in the HGST's reliability, but once you factor the added cost of a SAS 12G controller, the step between both companies' offers is significant.
 
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jtr1962

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The main problem with high speeds is less reliability. Nothing I read would inspire much confidence in me to trust 10TB of data to 5 or 6 disks spinning at 120 times per second. It seems like drives are failing much more often than they used to because the HDD manufacturers are pushing the envelope too far. You can have higher bit density or you can have higher rotational speeds, but not both. In general, the greater density will compensate for the slower rotational rate and you'll end up with the same STRs. Seek time will be higher, but I would imagine buffering the most used requests in RAM or flash could mostly mitigate that.

The problem here as far as I'm concerned isn't what data centers do. If they can manage the risks of using huge 7200 RPM drives using RAID that's fine. The problem is when all you have is 7200 RPM for consumer drives. Right now if I needed a few TB of storage my only real alternatives are to look for NOS 5400 RPM 1 or 2 TB drives (I won't trust anything denser than that even at 5400 RPM), or suck it up and buy large capacity SSDs. Noise is another reason I'm not keen on 7200 RPM drives, regardless of the density. 5400 RPM is much better, 3600 RPM would be better still.
 

LunarMist

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The main problem with high speeds is less reliability. Nothing I read would inspire much confidence in me to trust 10TB of data to 5 or 6 disks spinning at 120 times per second. It seems like drives are failing much more often than they used to because the HDD manufacturers are pushing the envelope too far. You can have higher bit density or you can have higher rotational speeds, but not both. In general, the greater density will compensate for the slower rotational rate and you'll end up with the same STRs. Seek time will be higher, but I would imagine buffering the most used requests in RAM or flash could mostly mitigate that.

The problem here as far as I'm concerned isn't what data centers do. If they can manage the risks of using huge 7200 RPM drives using RAID that's fine. The problem is when all you have is 7200 RPM for consumer drives. Right now if I needed a few TB of storage my only real alternatives are to look for NOS 5400 RPM 1 or 2 TB drives (I won't trust anything denser than that even at 5400 RPM), or suck it up and buy large capacity SSDs. Noise is another reason I'm not keen on 7200 RPM drives, regardless of the density. 5400 RPM is much better, 3600 RPM would be better still.

You clearly don't own or use the newer drives. The helium requires less power to rotate and creates less noise.
MTBF is 2 or 2.5M for the newer enterprise drives. Compare that to a 2TB consumer drive. Anyway, run RAID 1 if you are paranoid about availability and backup regularly.
 
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