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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
We should save the helium for more critical applications, such as filling up balloons and talking like Munchkins.
Well, after getting up off the floor after a good roll around and laugh, I'll remind myself that HDDs don't contain an internal ignitor. Nor does their firmware support a 'detonate HD' opcode.
Have gnu, will travel.
"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.
Look up partial pressure in some physics book. If you have gas in some leaky container at some pressure, it doesn't matter that there is another gas at another pressure outside of that container. Even if the different gases are at equal pressure, what will happen is that each will diffuse into the other through the aperture. That diffusion depends just on the respective partial pressures.
Helium at a lower pressure does not face an uphill battle due to the excess pressure outside of the container. It just diffuses through the apertures in the imperfect containers at a lower rate due to its lower pressure.
What would slow down the leak would be if there was helium on the outside at the same pressure, because then there would be as much helium diffusing into the container as diffusing out. But there is very little helium outside the hard drive, it being such a rare gas.
I think that if the apertures in the leaky container are such that helium can escape, but air cannot get in, then in fact the container will slowly evacuate. Pressure in that container will gradually drop as helium escapes, while hardly any finds its way back in.
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
Argon was just showing how noble he was.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.