Thursday, December 3, 2015

A 10TB Helium-filled Disk-Drive WITHOUT shingling

I'll bet you thought I was done here, hey? No, just very busy this last year.
This seems like a sufficiently significant bit of news to warrant a quick mention though.
WDC's shingle-free stocking filler: A 10TB helium disk drive
The spec' is pretty amazing and available in PDF format Here.
Here's a quick rundown -
Western Digital Corporation (WDC) has updated its Ultrastar He8 to the He10, providing the same capacity as the shingled HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 announced in June but without the shingling, meaning standard write speeds.
Compared to the He8 it has 25 per cent more capacity, and WDC says it has a 56 per cent lower watts/TB rating than traditional air-filled HDDs, a 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean-time-between-failures) rating, and a five-year warranty.
The drive has a second-generation, dual-stage HGST Micro-Actuator to enhance tracking accuracy and reliability in multi-disk enclosures. It is said to be "drop-in ready for all mainstream enterprise capacity applications." This presumably, partly at least, explains why WDC can now get to the 10TB capacity level without having to shingle (partially overlap) tracks and incur the penalty of slower rewrite speeds.
It rotates at 7,200rpm and is a classic capacity-optimized drive, with a 256MB cache and 249MB/sec sustained transfer rate. The previous He8 had a 205MB/sec sustained transfer rate. It can have a 6Gbit/s SATA interface or a 12Gbit/s SAS one.
There are Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options and the disk is built for 24 x 7 operation. To increase reliability, it retains a previous firmware version for safer firmware updates.

I think that Santa could probably fit that in his sack without any problem.