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BlackHoles1

Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope have announced that they'll apply helium-filled difficult drives from Western Digital's HGST sectionalisation in lieu of conventional hardware. At beginning glance, this might sound similar a marketing stunt — HGST apparently wants high-profile wins for its hermetically-sealed, helium-filled hard drives, and a new enquiry project that combines telescope information from 10 unlike geographic locations into a single functional observatory might audio like just the ticket. Well-nigh of these observatories are congenital on mountains to take advantage of loftier-altitude visibility, and it turns out that high altitude observatories run into unique data storage bug.

When the Large Millimeter Telescope began recording data on an array of 32 traditional hard drives, Computerworld reports, 28 of them failed. "Nosotros couldn't use them because the air pressure was so low that the drive heads kept crashing on the hard drive platters," the project caput, Shep Doeleman, told the site. "Using sealed helium drives was the just way to ensure that data could exist captured in remote locations, such as our high-altitude observatory in Mexico, where all other storage devices physically failed. Additionally, the high chapters of each drive ensured that nosotros were able to build denser and fewer enclosures overall."

MillimeterTelescope

Safe advisories and other warnings echo Doeleman's words. Dell doesn't certify its hard drives to operate above x,000 feet (at fifteen,200 feet, the Large Millimeter Telescope is well above this signal). The bulldoze heads are designed to float on a cushion of air, but when the air density begins to drop, the pressure within the bulldoze isn't sufficient to maintain the condom cushion. Multiple articles online discuss the need to hermetically seal any drive that's going to operate at pregnant altitude, particularly in war machine applications. Apparently the researchers had persevered with using 4TB standard drives, despite the high failure rates, just HGST offers an option to increase density to 8TB, cutting failure rates dramatically, and cut the cost of assembling the final data ready.

Why not utilise SSDs?

The obvious question would be why the Issue Horizon Telescope don't utilise SSDs, which wouldn't suffer altitude bug at all. The most likely respond is because of the sheer corporeality of data the telescopes collect — each of the telescopes that participates in the project collects over 900TB of data. While the cost of consumer SSDs has dropped precipitously in contempo years, enterprise SSDs are still quite expensive — and 900TB worth of enterprise solid-land storage is going to make any administrator flinch. HGST's drives undoubtedly come up at a premium, but Doeleman reports that the cost/performance curve is still amend than the current alternatives.

In one case the data is gathered at each individual location, the entire prepare of drives is physically shipped to the MIT Haystack Observatory, where a network of ~800 CPUs crunches the data through what Doeleman refers to as a "silicon lens." By using advanced algorithms and specialized processing techniques, scientists are able to analyze the outcome horizon of the supermassive black pigsty at the heart of our ain galaxy — Sagittarius A*.

The goal of the EHT scientists is to measure out and observe the immediate environment around the supermassive blackness hole to determine its characteristics and nature. It'south fitting that helium, which is relatively abundant in space but relatively scarce on World, helps us explore the nature of deep space and the vast structures at the center of our own galaxy.