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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.
Finally a real cloud drive!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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
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.
And helium. Shut up I'm telling you how it works.
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.
You're thinking hydrogen. This is HELIUM!
H = OH THE HUMANITY
He = OH THE CHIPMUNK HUMANITY
Actually it's deceptively hard. Helium has a way of diffusing right through an air tight seal.
Well, we could use just plain H. Wouldn't Hydrogen be better? After all it's lighter. It could make a drive failure a bit more obvious and fun...
(Sarcastic grin)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
It's also even harder to contain than helium - and that's quite an achievement. Hydrogen is quite happy to leak through solid metal, given a bit of time. The atoms are so small, they fit *between* the atoms of a metal, and in the spaces between crystal grains.
We're talking about small quantities. Think of how many drives you could fill with one balloon's worth of Helium.
But yes, I get seriously pissed off when I see precious helium that could've been used as a coolant for superconductive magnets (and HDD filler, it seems) being used to fill balloons. If you must absolutely have a stupid floating balloon or massive balloon parade, use hydrogen. When something happens, people will be so scared (even though a large hydrogen fire in an open space or a small one indoors aren't particularly dangerous by fire standards) they'll never want a balloon again unless it's filled with air.
Sure, it might ruin little Jimmy's birthday party, but a spectacular hydrogen fire is mostly spectacular and is not a waste of Helium.
If you ever participate in the usage of Helium you will probably be partly responsible for the day when:
a) An MRI cannot operate because its superconductive electromagnet is not superconductive because it's not cool enough - liquid Helium cools it. (Yes, there are permanent magnet MRIs, but from what I've heard, most powerful MRIs use superconductive electromagnets).
b) A particle accelerator cannot operate because its superconductive electromagnets aren't being cooled by liquid helium.
Compared to those, lower capacity HDDs are a nuisance and not having floating balloons is a miniscule price to pay.
Which makes me wonder WHY He and not Xenon or another far easier to contain gas.
Xenon makes no sense whatsoever. It is heavier and infinitely more expensive than air. It is also a poor heat conductor, which is why it is sometimes used in sealed triple pane windows. It would be a terrible choice.
The point of using helium is that it is light, has low viscosity, high thermal conductivity, and is cheap enough to use in party balloons. Hydrogen is better on all these counts, but leaks more easily, can chemically react with some lubricants, and causes metals to become brittle. The only reason to even consider using any other heavier gas, would be if even helium leaked too much. But apparently they have that problem licked. So helium wins.
This is not squandering, this is a good use and a great example of why we should not be squandering our helium reserves. And you could probably make a 100 drives for the amount of helium in 1 birthday balloon (the open space in a drive is a rather small percentage of the drive, which in turn is much smaller than a balloon).
Welcome to Slashdot... where every advance is obvious and every technology is attempted to be debunked by high school level science knowledge.
Additionally, if some technology is not 100% perfect, it's automatically completely useless. :P
Not entirely true, hydrogen gas is pairs of hydrogens forming a molecule whereas helium is single atoms floating around making it much smaller and much harder to contain.
No, this is wrong. H2 is more permeable than He through almost any material. In particular, helium will not permeate through bulk metal that is carefully annealed to contain no microscopic cracks. Hydrogen, on the other hand, will slowly permeate directly through most (or maybe all?) bulk metals.
What the hell does this have to do with money?
So you believe that in the future helium will be scarce but cheap? Or maybe plentiful but expensive?
Yes, it's theoretically possible to gouge future generations when Helium starts running out
Look, the US government maintained helium reserves for decades, and continuously lost money doing so. The reason is that we are NOT running out. There is plenty that is co-produced with natural gas, and there is plenty more in deeper deposits where it is naturally produced by alpha emission from radioactive substances, primarily thorium-232. In recent years the price of helium has gone up, but that is not because we are "running out", but the opposite: many of the Helium producing wells in Texas have been capped because they cannot compete with the price of shale gas. So more helium is staying in the ground.
History is full of chicken-little prognosticators that think they are smarter than the people actually willing to invest their money in their beliefs. If you really believe we are running out of helium, then you are free to invest your money in that belief. Someday you can sail your yacht pass all of us Pollyannas and say "I told you so."
" but leaks more easily"
No it does not. Helium is mono-atomic and has the smallest atomic radius of the mono-atomic gasses. This is why it leaks more than anything.
Hydrogen may be the smallest di-atomic molecule.
Most bombs become useless shortly after their first use anyway.
The head never moves, the disk spins under it. Putting a wing shape on the head wouldn't do anything.
It's too bad the disk doesn't drag some air along with it as it spins. If there was a layer of moving air along the boundary between the solid and gas, the heads could fly in that region.