Behold our SPINNING DATA GRAVE: WD carts out 6.3TB cold storage drive Western Digital’s WD has paralleled its HGST sibling and introduced an archive drive – but with just 6.3TB of capacity compared to HGST’s 10TB, 8TB and 6TB drives. Er, what? WD is branding its new drive the Ae, standing for, we think A(rchiv)e, and so moving away from its colours-focussed branding with Red, Green, Blue and …
Re, Se and Xe... so Ae fits in nicely with its business focused offerings.
And the article forgot "purple" from the WD rainbow too...
and 500,000 MTBF is operational hours, and i imagine the usages scenario for this drive is that it is designed to be "off" for quite a proportion of the time
The creeping storage capacity also seems peculiar. There should be some predictability and consistency with regards to parts, especially if you are going to be swapping out parts as they fail or become obsolete.
The .1 TB capacity improvement is nowhere near as valuable as having consistent replaceable components.
If it matters for your application, you just use 6.0 TB of it. Some applications don't care, so they get a bit more capacity for "free".
I doubt they're really improving density though. More likely they're making them better so they don't map out as many tracks during the factory formatting and/or have fewer tracks reserved against failures? Be interested to know a bit more detail why this drive would be gaining 5% capacity over nine months.
Sounds odd giving a 3 year warranty for a drive aimed at archiving. If they sold an archive drive with a 10+ year warranty, that'd be more like it.
You can get optical media with a 100-year warranty ... for all the good that does. If you find the disk isn't readable after 99 years they're hardly going to hop into the Tardis and go back and make another copy!
The point of a warranty in these cases is to give you some feeling for the manufacturer's confidence (or their insurers' confidence) in the longevity of the product. The fact that hard drives are available with 5-year warranties doesn't encourage me to choose a drive with only a 3-year warranty for long-term storage.
.... you've just agreed with the OP. Anyway 5yr used to be the standard for warranty I'd look for, for at least a desktop system that's getting harder and harder.
I'm starting to wonder if we will see warranties which depend on time drive has been running rather than clock time. Warranty for 500,000 hrs run time would be far more trusted than it can sit in a box for 3 years and be fine!.
I'm starting to wonder if we will see warranties which depend on time drive has been running rather than clock time. Warranty for 500,000 hrs run time would be far more trusted than it can sit in a box for 3 years and be fine!.
That reminds me of old Convergent MegaFrame that needed a swift kick on the case (or gentle whack with rubber mallet to side of the disk if your were in better mood) for the disk to start spinning. Some issue with lubcrication on the drives if they were powered off long enough to cool down completely. Think the drives were Micropolis or Maxtor but been a quite a while so I may recall the make completely wrong.
Unfortunately, that number is only the theoretical Mean Time Between Failures. Although it may sound confidently optimistic, WD castrated the idea by offering a paltry 3 year warranty on your archive drives.
Surely they must have another business case for this model?
Not a neat trick. Just partial pressure. It's just that Helium has very small particles and there is so little of it in the atmosphere that for practical purposes, it's vacuum for Helium (and vice-versa, Helium-filled spaces are vacuum for all other gases).
As for neat tricks, it does have superfluid properties at extremely low temperatures, but while it's cool (pun intended), that is a frequently misunderstood phenomenon; do look up superfluidity.
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