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WD Builds High-Capacity, Helium-Filled HDDs
Lucas123 writes "Western Digital subsidiary HGST today announced that after 10 years of development it is preparing to release 3.5-in data center-class HDDs that are hermetically sealed with helium inside. The helium reduces drag and wind turbulence created by the spinning platters, all but eliminating track misregistration that has become a major issue to increasing drive density in recent years. Because of that, HGST will be able to add two more platters along with increasing the tracks per inch, which results in a 40% capacity increase. The drives will also use 23% less power because of the reduction of friction on the spindle. HGST said the new seven-platter helium drives will weigh 29% less per terabyte of capacity that today's five-platter drives. In other words, a seven-platter helium disk will weigh 690 grams, the same as today's five-platter drives."
Those of you wondering why they don't just use a vacuum inside the drive. Hard drive heads ride on a cusion of air (or in this case, a gas of some kind) so that they don't crash against the drive.
Just imagine something like this with a huge 'WD' logo on the side inside your computer.
There's no place like
New Helium filled drives weigh less!
So that is where all the Helium has gone...
Is this going to be cheaper than SSD? The price point for solid state finally reached where platter drives were about ten years ago (a dollar or less a gig) and I installed one on my system just last week as my OS drive. Also, are these going to be significantly faster than the standard five platter density drives? Frankly, weight only matters in tablets, phones, and laptops. I'm not aware of any crushing weight problems in the steel server racks...
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
These disks are great except when you replay audio files the vocalists sound like munchkins.
Proverbs 21:19
What about the impending Helium shortage?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/med-tech/why-is-there-a-helium-shortage-10031229
Helium was used as a lubricant in fixed head disk drives in the late 60's.
They had to keep a tank of it attached since it is very difficult to keep it from leaking out.
How, exactly, are they going to keep the Helium from leaking out?
The lighter weight is due to using thinner platters not the helium.
You'll sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks!
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
I don't think the article nor the summary states it's due to the gas.
Yet another way to use up a nonrenewable resource.
Well, they can't ride the price-surge wave of the Thailand floods anymore, so they have to keep those prices up somehow.
These drives are not the first. Circa 1969, Digital Development Corporation of San Diego sold a line of head-per-track disks that used a helium atmosphere. A typical unit took around 24 inches vertical height in a 19-inch rack. Given the difficulties of sealing anything against helium leakage, these drives required a small helium cylinder and pressure regulator to maintain a small positive pressure within the enclosure, and had a pop-off valve to vent excess pressure. The electronics consisted of about a dozen circuit cards built with discrete transistors. The capacities of these units were amusingly small by modern standards: the first one that I had direct experience with, held something like 128K bytes.
Sure they weigh less, because they are filled with helium. But when the servers start lifting off the ground and floating off, they might have to rethink this idea.
Sure helium could improve performance and be beneficial for some uses, but anyone buying these need to ask what happens when the helium inevitably leaks out...
To me it looks another example of planned obsolescence at work. Though, perhaps, WD will take the razor blade approach and sell helium refill kits.
Maybe some of us already like prog.
anyone buying these need to ask what happens when the helium inevitably leaks out...
No worries; when the balloon attached to the side is half-full you know it's time to replace the drive and then find a child to give the balloon to.
Or if you are not in a hurry take the drive in to any Party Center USA store for a free refill.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This drive's weight and its mass will be different due to the buoyancy of the helium in a sealed container. I wonder if the drives contain 690 grams of mass, or if their weight is the same as a non-buoyant 690-gram object (i.e. 6.77 newtons at sea level on Earth). The implication seems to be that the helium-filled drives contain more than 690 grams of mass, but weigh the same as a 690-gram object.
Brings about a whole new meaning to keeping your data "in the cloud," doesn't it?
OK, so that didn't sound as funny as I thought it would...there's a joke in there somewhere, dammit.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's one of the most plentiful elements in the universe. If there is a market for it, it will be obtained somehow. The threatened shortage is what happens when government gets involved with things.
15 platters on conventional disks = 3 motors, 3 actuators, 3 electronic boards, and 3 power supplies to fail.
14 platters on two He disks = 33% fewer of these, with more storage.
Cue the Hindenberg jokes(Oh teh humaniteez!). But then consider that hydrogen is used to cool large generators. And you don't see these exploding randomly.
Have gnu, will travel.
There shouldn't be. Its a by-product of natural gas production. And what with the way that is growing, the supply coming out of the ground should be increasing as well.
If there is a shortage, the price should go up. And the gas producers will happily invest in the recovery equipment needed.
Have gnu, will travel.
these "floatable" hard drives for (covered previously on slashdot) skateboards will now be able to "catch some rad air"? :)
Another advantage of using a drive filled with helium is better thermal conductivity than air (0.142 vs 0.024) . The heat generated by the inner workings of the drive will be conducted to the outer case, keeping the inside cooler.
I guess that means that GP is fired.
According to Wiki, for half a century the US Constitution was hermetically sealed inside a glass container with helium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal
:(){
Now, instead of using a half dozen smaller drives you can use just one. And when it dies you can lose everything at once. No screwing around losing bits and pieces of your files.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Yes, I worked in some of those drives (I remember a "big" 10 meg drive) and the helium leakage will be a problem. But not for WD, only for the users. The helium will leak (the damn stuff is tiny and leaks out of anything ), but WD only needs to keep enough inside or the drive to last beyond the absurdly short warranty period. Then the drive self destructs. Good for WD if they manage to keep creating a market for new drives, bad for the customer.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"Its a by-product of natural gas production. And what with the way that is growing, the supply coming out of the ground should be increasing as well."
Ah-ah-ah! No! Natural gas and helium are formed in two different kind of rocks, but in a traditional natural gas reservoir, there's a dome of cap rock which traps and pools the gas and keeps it from leaking to the surface. The cap traps both natural gas and helium.
But the growing supply of natural gas in the past few years comes from fracking. There's no cap in a fracked well, just source rock, and so they *won't* produce helium.
All of my music files sound like they were recorded by Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Seems to me it's pretty easy to solve the problem of the helium leaking out: fill the drive with helium at low pressure -- just below the lowest atmospheric pressure you intend to use the disk. The helium will try to diffuse out through the metal, but it's an uphill battle. Now all you've got to do is seal the disk so air can't get *in*, which is easy enough, and your drive will last forever. I haven't done the math, but it should work.
Your the only one who made that claim.
Now when you tell the end-user that they "let the magic smoke out" you might be completely accurate.
Except they are using helium, and not hydrogen.
They are on opposite ends of the periodic table for a reason.
Goodness people, tag it magic smoke.
I have several WD drives (Caviar Black and Green), and have had some of them for years. Not a single one of them has failed on me. (Yet. Fingers crossed!)
That reminds me... Backup time.
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...The Carbon Gang, Nitrogen Group, and the Oxygen Brotherhood reacted explosively to the news. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
A PET transmission source is Ge-68 or Cs-137, both gamma emitters.
The 90% shielding thickness in lead is about 3". A 3" thick suit is too heavy to move.
Add to that problem, the fact that shielding a source imperfectly is bad for you, because of the nature of how shielding works.
Shielding from gamma photons require a series of scattering collisions with the shielding media, losing energy with each one, usually as x-ray photons or lattice vibrations.
Low energy photons in the low x-ray region are very likely to be fully absorbed by the body; high energy gammas tend to go right thru you, depositing less energy.
Tshirt and shorts are also great when you're removing all the gantry covers, too. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
You're about 3 orders of magnitude off my gut says. 1m^3 gives you a buoyancy of more than 1 kg/g0, enough to lift the drive.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Permeation rates of helium is much, much lower than hydrogen in metals, especially steels where hydrogen permeates much faster than non-nobel gases, which permeate much faster than noble gases. Considering most large vacuum and pressure vessels are made of varieties of steel, hydrogen is typically the most problematic gas to deal with keeping in or out in many situations.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chipmunks+bad+day
It's not like they're going to specifically be made to be compatible with TiVo drive controllers.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
My MP3s will sound like The Chipmunks and God knows what my porn will look like!...
All of the breasts will be inflated.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Now with helium in the drive, all your mp3s will sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Or is it Helium? In that case, the Tharks will be constantly attacking your computer.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Don't worry, the Oil Cooling will weigh it down
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
...after the Bernoulli effect.
They were made by Iomega, according to Wikipedia.
I never saw any personally and remember the Syquest removable HDD cart drives being more common, at least in the 1990s when removable HDD technology was viable.
But how much heavier is the drive going to be if you make it that big?
Admittedly I'm not running a data center or anything so my experience is limited, but the only hard drives I've ever had fail on me have both been 80GB WD Caviars. Purchased a couple years apart. Haven't bought a WD drive since.
Weight is such a factor in notebook applications, and helium filled drives could enable a new class of devices weighing significantly less than existing hard drivers...
I was a member of ASTM before I even connected to a BBS on a dialup modem, but as I indicated elsewhere, it's not a difficult problem and I could have given you the same answer as a first year student.
I've attached a link to a simple experiment that should give you an idea of what is going on, which can then be modified for different materials and thicknesses, so you'd design the drive with a thick enough wall of aluminium or whatever to get a long enough life.
http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/project1075_91_1.html
The actual "math" is on wikipedia under diffusion.
Anyway, my point is that filling the drives with helium results in a finite drive life and the time is going to depend on how long it takes to lose the gas. It just means the thing has to be designed with that in mind and to say push it out to decades where it's likely to have failed another way anyway.
Not surmised that way by anyone with a grasp on high school level physics or chemistry. To take things to a higher level than that, you get age hardening of some aluminium alloys by diffusion within a solid at room temperature over a timescale of months - just because it's a solid that does not mean it's a barrier that stops everything, and that especially applies when something very small is diffusing through a structure.
Mine are from some hundred GB and up to 2 TB, so maybe they got better recently?
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A link for anyone who feels the AC has some kind of point.
http://www.periodictable.com/Properties/A/UniverseAbundance.html