(credit: Seagate) Good news if you like big hard drives: Seagate announced on an earnings call yesterday ( as reported by PC World ) that it has both 14TB and 16TB versions of its helium-filled spinning hard drives in the pipeline for the next 18 months. A 12TB version of the drive is “being tested” and should be ready sooner rather than later. And the push for ever-higher capacities will continue after that—Seagate wants to have a 20TB drive ready by 2020, and it would like to push the minimum capacity for drives shipping in new PCs to 1TB. 500GB drives are typical in entry-level models these days. Seagate still slightly trails some of its competitors here—HGST beat Seagate to market with the 10TB version of its helium-filled hard drive, and HGST already has a 12TB version of the same drive on the market. But Seagate’s drives tend to be cheaper than HGST’s, and while HGST drives have lower failure rates according to Backblaze’s drive reliability data , Seagate’s reliability has greatly improved in recent years . Larger hard drives make it possible to increase the capacity of a server or a home NAS unit without actually needing more physical space. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read the original:
Seagate wants to push huge 16TB HDD out the door in next 18 months
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10, 000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, “was way off.” It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms — at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal. All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up. Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren’t up to the task. “Diamond failure, ” they note, “is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH, ” where SMH means “solid metallic hydrogen” rather than “shaking my head.” The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample. After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally — they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen’s breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals The study has been published in the journal Science. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
