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6TB Helium-Filled Hard Drives Take Flight
An anonymous reader writes in with some exciting news if you are a storage array manufacturer with a lot of money to spend on hard drives."HGST Monday announced that it's now shipping a helium-filled, 3.5-in hard disk drive with 50% more capacity than the current industry leading 4TB drives. The new drive uses 23% less power and is 38% lighter than the 4TB drives. Without changing the height, the new 6TB Ultrastar He6 enterprise-class hard drive crams seven disk platters into what was a five disk-platter, 4TB Ultrastar drive."
Helium love to leak. How long will these have the He pressure they need to work?
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
another way to squander our helium reserves :s
Finally a real cloud drive!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Surprised it took the industry 30+ years to figure out how to do something so deceptively simple.
I guess all that helium is what makes it so light
Also, after reading the subject I wondered why they would strap harddisks onto a helium-filled balloon and send them into the sky...
Here is a relevant portion FTA on what the helium actually DOES (unfortunately not mentioned in the summary):
At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.
The helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
all the MP3 sound like The Chipmunks.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They're filled with helium.
"I was so tired of having to vacuum around Howard's RAID drives. Now we just keep them on the ceiling!"
I wonder if they will explode when punctured?
Helium tends to like to leak out of things. One has to wonder if the power consumption and reliability and speed of the drives will worsen after, say, a decade deployed in the field as the helium gradually is replaced by air. I suppose that has the added benefit for the hard drive manufacturer of a pretty firm drop-dead (or at least significantly reduced performance) date.
But the increased complexity of the technical approach, i.e. cramming more platters (and using fancy technical tricks like using helium) versus just increasing platter areal density, portends an end to the incredibly fast reduction in storage costs over the last three decades.
Another option may be to operate the devices in a soft vacuum (back-filled with a little bit of helium, perhaps). That may further reduce drag. However, I believe the heads rely on an air cushion in order to avoid contact with the platters, so there would be a limit to this.
Why not pump at least a partial vacuum out? Would it be too hard to do mechanically?
And helium. Shut up I'm telling you how it works.
I hear it's going to explode on the market
what do you do what do you do?
This is going to put a whole new spin on the term, my hard drive exploded!!
So when they say "shipping" do they mean they mailed themselves a demonstration model? They haven't announced the price yet.
Wake me up when you can order them from NewEgg.
(Though the technology is interesting.)
They spent 10 years researching how to reliably seal it into an enclosure...
Also it is not under the same requirements of a compressed gas canister. The whole point of using helium is for the advantages of it's fluid dynamics compared to a normal air mixture, that's why it's not pressurised.
I've always wondered why they didn't just use a near vacuum enclosure, but i suppose it's much easier to not deal with pressure difference and use a super low resistance fluid instead at the same atmospheric pressure.
Only when landing in Lakehurst NJ... Oh the Humanity...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The problem with leaking hydrogen inside a computer case when it mixes with oxygen and forms water vapor. Condensation inside a computer would not be pleasant
I've always wondered why they didn't just use a near vacuum enclosure
The heads have to have air or some gas to make them "fly". In a vacuum, the heads grind the oxide off the platters.
Inside the drive a thin film of air is the only thing standing between the drive heads and platters. If the drive head gets too close to the surface, the air is compressed and pushes back on the head. Take that away and you'll be carving the platters like a pumpkin the first time anything bumps or shakes the drive.
I know more discs actually do make a difference, but it did remind me of this...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/
Taloraan storage.
My First thought....A clown running around with helium filled disks... brain:WTF.
With all that helium leaking in the server room.
We know that He leaks through nearly everything. When it does leak, it will be "replaced" by vacuum if no gas can get through from the outside. So even less drag and the drive will get better as it ages (notwhistanding a lot of other problems). Somewhat like how they put nitrogen in potato chips bags, just to clear air out of the way.
If you'd do a bit of reading the mystery is gone.
HDD heads require an gas (air) cushion to function properly. Bernoulli principle is what it is called.
<quote><p>I've always wondered why they didn't just use a near vacuum enclosure</p></quote>
If He is such a good idea, why not pure nitrogen? Lot cheaper than He.
Race cars use pure nitrogen for tires. It's a tiny bit lighter, it's less corrosive, and less thermodynamically expansive. Although, that would've killed James Bond-- there's a scene where the bad guys dump his car into a lake with him in it, and he survives by breathing the air from the tires.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
A fusion bomb with heavy helium? Is there such a thing?
He not so much. Actually, the nitrogen is good because it does not leak out...its a big molecule. Maybe they want a small molecule for best effect.
I remember when major manufacturers where selling disk drives that were not even watertight. They would claim they were. No one usually noticed. They were more likely to fail for other reasons. A partial vacuum is far more plausible that people realize. There are aircraft that fly at 100,000 ft or so. Which is probably just about as difficult as flying in one atmosphere of helium. Helium is hard to contain. It may diffuse through castings and seals. Its low molecular (atomic) weight is only twice hydrogen's molecular ( diatomic) weight. This reduces drag and increases heat transfer. Since the power to volume ratio increases inversely to the fourth power of the disk diameter, Helium's time has been pondered for decades. At some point shrinking drives would justify the cost of introducing and containing and helium. The major challenge is keeping the helium inside.It may be at atmospheric pressure but ther is very little helium to migrate inside, Eventually and drive that is more air tight than helium tight will become a drive operating at a partial vacuum. Keeping the helium clean from wear particles, water vapor and out gassing provide addition challenges. Another issue is that barometric changes could cause small deformations in the drive structure that are much larger than the distance between tracks. The seals have to be pretty much dirt cheap without driving up assembly costs. Hydrogen may be in the future. It has been used for decades in electricity production. Were I to introduce hydrogen, I would be glad to have had the chance for all the practice I could get from helium.
Yea, nothing new here. Back in the mid 1970's I had a big 10 meg helium filled hard drive where I worked. Had it's own helium tank on it and the pressure gauge had to be checked regularly because helium can pretty much get through anything. That was a drive that was priced in the six figures, I doubt if WD is going to be doing any better even several decades later on a drive that costs a few hundred bucks and doesn't even have an extra helium tank. They more likely than not are counting on the leaking as a planned obsolescence issue.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If you install a dozen of these drives in your system, will it start floating?
"That's great Jim, you got it to hold pressure at sea level! Now make it work at 10,000 feet."
With all the reports of drive after drive failing from certain brands, I wonder what people are doing to their hard drives. Over 20 years, I've had ONE drive fail in a computer, and it was seven years old. My current 1TB Seagate is 9 years old.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Hard drives talking flight? What will scientists invent next?!
I don't understand.
Fill it with neon! My hard drives double as lamps.
The article notes "The new drive [...] is 38% lighter than the 4TB drives." Just how much helium is in these things, anyway?
Well DUH! Of course! So -- increase the pressure 4x and have the drives floating above the computer or shelf.
That'd also make it easy to find any busted drives -- just look for the ones now sitting on the floor.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I evaluated storage prices in July 2009 and June 2012. This is a good chance to check how prices have changed.
What's the actual retail price for 10TB of storage?
July 2009: Platter = $750, Flash = $28,125
June 2012: Platter = $567, Flash = $8,200
November 2013: Platter = $450, Flash = $5,417
Based on the trends from 16 months ago, I would have expected the platter price for 10TB to be $495, and the flash price to be $4,506. Traditional drives beat my predictions, which seems to show that the industry has fully recovered from the various production and reliability issues which plagued the 3TB generation of drives. The pace of improvement for flash drives has slowed, but it's still jaw-droppingly quick. Will this pace continue to slow as the technical challenges become more complex?
New Prediction for July 2014: Platter = $416, Flash = $4,204
New Prediction for July 2015: Platter = $370, Flash = $2,875
New Prediction for July 2019: Platter = $231, Flash = $629
New Prediction for July 2024: Platter = $128, Flash = $94
This is all good news for the hard drive industry, and bad news for those of us hoping to stop relying on rapidly spinning disks. The predicted date when the technologies reach price equivalence is pushed back to May 2023, from the previous prediction of August 2020. If the pace of flash memory development continues to slow, and hard drives get a boost from helium technology, this date will drift even further out of reach. I don't want to imagine that hard drives could still have a meaningful role into the 2030's, but it's conceivable.
To end on a happier note for flash storage, consider that the price ratio for flash storage vs. platter storage was 37.5x in July 2009. After a little more than 4 years, the ratio is down to 12x! That's unbelievable progress, especially considering that flash technology is chasing a fast-moving target.
Everything comes out sounding like Donald Duck.
was the sound of the helium bomb passing over your head.
Don't worry, it's the Shelium that bites.
No brain, no pain.
Dear ComputerWorld,
The word is "manufacturers", not "manufactures". Sheesh!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The head never moves, the disk spins under it. Putting a wing shape on the head wouldn't do anything.
Yay, what an amazing invention...oh wait, it's a Hitachi so it will fail after 366 days. Forget that then.
I thought conventional wisdom was to at least mix batches, if not brands.
I haven't done this in years, nor has anyone else I know. What I do instead is a badblocks test of every drive with before+after SMART parameter collection, and then a burn-in of a week or two, usually just part of bringing the system online.
We also limit ourselves to 2TB drives tops, because 3TB drives have a higher failure rate and 4TB drive failure rates are reportedly astronomical.
Please help metamoderate.
Percentage of air surrounding platter containing Helium or Hydrogen. When helium is all gone so is your data.
This takes away the fun I used to have with old failing hard drives: Install a webserver in a test rig with webcam pointed at the disk sitting out on a workbench, then remove the top cover and see how long it would live.
I can already see... a customer support call center all in laughing because of a bunch of chipmunks in the line...
But will it make my voice all squeaky if I breathe too close to it?
Pnårp's docile & perfunctory page!