Seagate Enterprise Capacity - Helium hard drive 10 TB

What are helium wheels

The amount of digital data is increasing day by day. Computer games, high-definition video, music in uncompressed format, photos and other files eat up more and more storage space. A similar situation is observed not only on home computers, but also in companies.

Of course, if there is a phobia that your data will be stored by strangers, you can trust cloud services, that's only worth it is quite expensive and is not always convenient to store large files. And in these stores all of the information is also stored on the same hard drives.

That is why, in spite of the offensive on all fronts of solid state media, mechanical drives continue to develop rapidly, increasing terabytes. But recently, it seems, came the limit beyond which it will not turn without moving to a qualitatively new level to increase the volume of the carrier in the form factor of 3.5 inches.

So far, there are two solutions: the use of SMR-technology (which clearly shows itself only archival disks because there are difficulties in the data rewriting time) and carriers filled helium.

The fact that helium - an inert gas, which is seven times lighter than air. Consequently, less than the frictional force, and read heads are not only easier to navigate in this environment, but much less vibrate.

With this technology it is possible:

• reduce the distance between the plates;
• reduce energy consumption;
• increase the accuracy of head positioning;
• increase the volume of standard dimensions, while maintaining the high-speed read performance, recording, rewriting.

The solution from Seagate

Seagate has long walked to the decision on the basis of helium, starting development in far in 2003, but apparently only now technology has allowed to make a helium drive really affordable. And immediately a record capacity - 10 TB. It is the largest volume in the traditional dimensions, available to ordinary users. The disc was labeled ST10000NM0086 and belongs to the line of Enterprise Capacity, however, this does not prevent its use for home computers.

Appearance

The main difference between our hero from the traditional mechanical drives - a fully enclosed housing. And right there is the main problem of the new technology - the evaporation of helium over time. It is worth the gas to evaporate through the gaps in the soldering and the metal itself, then, as the hard drive can be carried to the dump. Seagate is well aware of and actively struggling with a problem:

• drive enclosure is not cast as competitors, and forged, so it will be less than the imperfections of the structure and the likelihood of crack formation.
• The lid is welded continuous rather than pulsed laser, creating a more reliable seal.
• Compound controller board with the electronics inside through a ceramic sleeve which is glued with epoxy resin to the housing. This helps to avoid the influence of thermal expansion and to increase the number of contacts for high heads.
• Installed temperature, humidity and pressure continuously monitor the atmosphere inside the housing, in advance warning the user of a possible imminent HDD failure.

At the bottom of the disc is set textolite board controller green color, which are wired chips. The connection is made through a standard power connector and SATA 3.0. Fasteners are provided on both side surfaces and on the bottom of the unit.

Disc dimensions - 102 × 26 × 147 mm, and weight - only 650 g It is 20% lighter than the model for 6 TB of the Seagate, where there are fewer discs and heads! This weight reduction has been achieved at the expense of forged body and interior design changes.

Internal organization

Reducing the distance between the plates is allowed to be placed inside the body as much as seven "pancakes" of 1.43 TB. Each is suitable for two read heads. Using traditional technology perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), which provides high disk performance. Positively to speed devices affects the characteristics and increased up to 256 MB clipboard.

Apart from that, Seagate Enterprise Capacity has an additional cache capacity of 2 MB, built on the basis of NOR Flash. It increases the random write performance, especially when the cache option is disabled in the memory (so as not to lose the data on failure). Spindle Speed ​​- 7200 rpm, the maximum sustained data rate of - 250 Mb / s.

Since the Enterprise Capacity range is designed for corporate use, the drive for reliability also imposed higher Requirements: MTBF is 2.5 million hours and sustain drive "blows" 40G in a running state and to 250G in off.

In addition to the helium inside the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD hidden several original pieces. Thus, the plates are balanced in two planes, which greatly reduces vibration as a disc, and several systems of HDD, and also improves heat dissipation.

If the disk head reaches a sector that is not possible to read for about 7 seconds, then it is marked as broken, and he has no more data will be recorded.

Special technical solutions compensates external vibrations.

RAID Rebuild feature speeds up the recovery of the array due to the data directly from the disk to be replaced. PowerChoice makes it possible to manually set the time-outs go to the power-saving modes. PowerBalance option allows you to order CDs with lower performance, but with greater energy efficiency, And if you connect Rescue support program, Seagate restore information from the disk in the event of damage. You can order a CD with additional options such as encryption, gipermasshtabirovanie, as well as an increased number of bytes per logical sector and others.

Drive supports in several modes:

• sleep when the head is parked, and the disks are not spinning (energy consumption - 0.8 W);
• three intermediate gradation idle mode (power consumption - 2,34-4,36 W);
• operating mode, when all alerted (energy consumption - 6,57-8,37 W depending on the operation).

For special mode switching is responsible host controller, optimizing power consumption.

Testing

Naturally, the overview of the CD would not be complete without testing. It was conducted on the following system: ASRock motherboard chip Z87, Intel i7-4770 processor, 16 GB of DDR3 dual-channel, Windows 7 operating system installed on a Solid State Drive Kingston. During the testing time only slightly warmed textolite board (about 50 degrees), and body temperature did not rise even to 28 degrees.

Disc can not be silent, and if pull it out of the case, it is possible to hear the head work. However, inside the system, which buzzes cooling the processor and graphics card, hard drive to hear the work is unlikely to succeed.

According to the results of measurements of the average read and write speed is at around 190-200 MB / s and a maximum reach of 250. Access time - average reading of 11 ms and 4 ms for writing. Further, measured time taken to copy a file of 40 GB (3 min. 37) and the 8000 files total size of 40GB (6 min. 26), which is clearly demonstrated life hacking: want to copy many files - make of them one copy and unzip.

Below - the results of the tests, where for comparison the data of identical tests on the same computer configuration for the disc of the NAS-line Seagate ST8000VN0002.

As you can see, the results of all tests helium disk exceed 8 terabaytnik for the NAS-systems, and the latter, in turn, have traditionally had high rates as compared to conventional user discs.

Total

Testing the new hard drive from the Seagate, we can safely say that the first attempt did not go lumpy. It has all the advantages of the inert gas: the record capacity, low power consumption, high fail-safe performance, and the company has made every effort to get rid of the disadvantages technologies.

But Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD - it's not just 10 TB, filled with helium. Due to the increased buffer, high-performance mechanics and many proprietary technologies in their characteristics he markedly superior to most traditional discs. The only thing not yet collected statistics about the reliability of helium drives, but the company assures that this option will also be higher than that of regular CDs.

Helium drive from Seagate has combined all the most advanced technology and years of experience of the company. The result is a good solution in the 3.5-inch HDD format. Despite the fact that the drive is designed for corporate use, it will be a great addition to a home PC.

The only thing that can stop him to register you in sistemnike - this is the price, which starts from 32 000 rubles (3200 rubles for 1 TB). Of course, it is more expensive than traditional drives, but if the number of slots for hard drives in your system is not so large, and the need for greater capacity and at the same good technical characteristics, the new disk from Seagate will be a good help. In addition, with the development of technology the price will gradually decline. Whether the future will be for helium - time will tell.