Seagate floats out 10TB HDD filled with lifting gas Seagate has caught up with WDC’s HGST unit and built a 7-platter, 10TB disk drive filled with helium gas. Western Digital Corporation (WDC) introduced its own 10TB Ultrastar He10 drive in December last year. This was a standard PMR tech drive, unlike the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 announced in June 2015, which used shingled …
MTBF is a nonsense statistic anyway.
What's rather odd is that Seagate don't even use MTBF anymore, they use Annual Failure Rate
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/174791en?language=en_US
Quite how that extrapolates into subsequent years, I don't know.
Your 6 years is rather good though. More often than not, the drive failures I get are Seagates
I havent had a Seagate drive that EVER lasted more than 3 years working; a 2 year old warranty replacement for another dead Seagate is dying right now in my rig.
(I am copying the data onto a new 3TB Toshiba right now).
Luckily I didnt pay for it, I got it for free; because I stopped buying them not long after XP came out.
I have IBM, WD, and Hitachi drives still going from machines that shipped with Win98se, and I have thrown away even older drives because sub 1GB is useless these days, but all were still working when they left for Silicon Heaven.
I've stuck with Seagate since the 90's, it's funny some people have complained to me about having Seagate failures when I've had no problems, yet in my brother's case, he's replaced 6 WD drives out of the 5 in his NAS - yep one warranty one died too - and I've had problems with WD drives before, so I stick to Seagate.
My Thecus N5500 has 5x Seagate 2TB greens that are still going strong since 2011, my work PC has a 500GB SSD plus a 3TB Seagate storage drive and the same at home.
O_O Seagate Greens in a NAS, normally hear lots of people have issues with the drives rebuilding when they don't really need to. Do you let them go to sleep?
I haven't had issues with either Seagate or WD personally (Although I seem to be one of the very few people who had no issues with Maxtor hard drives). I have WD Red's in my own NAS (Assuming your Brother is using WD Reds), how long did he use them for before they failed and what enclosure are they in (Drobo 5n for myself with an msata card for caching)
It could be that they have one drive in their HQ that has been running continuously for six million years - in which case it would raise the average mean time between failure of all their drives considerably.
It's unlikely, unless Seagate is making use of six-million-year-old alien technology. Unlikely, but not impossible!
This post has been deleted by its author
"We can expect Seagate to spread this helium-based technology across its portfolio of 3.4-inch and 2.5-inch disk drives and so regain basic capacity parity with WDC"
I know that computers have been getting smaller and faster...but shaving 0.1" off a hard drive isn't going to win friends, I'd have thought !!
Because hydrogen is a highly reactive element that will a. react with materials in the hard disc assembly and b. diffuse through the metal case. The end result will be an evacuated case with compromised components.
Solving the problem of maintaining constant head/disc separation in a vacuum, would be a better proposal. However, isn't this effort rather like the way that clockwork controllers suddenly became more reliable and cheaper when electronic controllers were introduced? Which controls your automated industrial process or domestic appliance nowadays? Do you expect to be using spinning rust in another 5 years?
The problem with Helium (or Hydrogen for that matter) is that they have small molecules and given their size, they can pass through many containers, including disk drive castings. This is a BIG problem, and isn't likely to be solved easily. It is kinda like "magic smoke" that when leaked out, makes electrical devices fail. Of course, Hydrogen by itself is HIGHLY reactive and can do nasty things to its containers, making them brittle (I have a friend that studied this in Material Science for his PhD).
All in all not an easy thing to do.
Helium is monatomic. It does not form molecules (unlike hydrogen which produces diatomic molecules at normal atmospheric pressure/temperature).
The main problem with hydrogen is that it is reactive and wholly unsuitable for use in a disk drive. With helium diffusion is problematical, but it is a soluble problem. It's difficult to see how the issue of hydrogen's reactivity can be overcome given the materials from which a disc drive must be manufactured.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
