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WD Announces 8TB, 10TB Helium Hard Drives
Lucas123 writes: Western Digital's HGST subsidiary today announced it's shipping its first 8TB and the world's first 10TB helium-filled hard drive. The 3.5-in, 10TB drive also marks HGST's first foray into the use of shingled magnetic recording technology, which Seagate began using last year. Unlike standard perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), where data tracks rest side by side, SMR overlaps the tracks on a platter like shingles on a roof, thereby allowing a higher areal density. Seagate has said SMR technology will allow it to achieve 20TB drives by 2020. That company has yet to use helium, however. HGST said its use of hermetically-sealed helium drives reduces friction among moving drive components and keeps dust out. Both drives use a 7-platter configuration with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. The company said it plans to discontinue its production of air-only drives by 2017, replacing all data center models with helium drives.
Considering a single balloon has more helium than $10,000 of these hard drives, I don't think this is going to be a serious issue anytime soon.
For party balloons, well, too bad.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
No, there are not. In this case, low molecular weight is the key, and that nearly rules out anything except H2 and He.
H2 is too reactive though. Ne is interesting, but even more expensive the He and the only advantage is less leaking.
N2 is not meaningfully different from normal air, and Ar is even heavier.
CH4 is cheap, light, and mostly unreactive (at moderate temps) but it's really not light enough to compete with He.
And that's the end of the list.
Just because congress decided we needed to get rid ot all our heilum supplies quick and dump it for cheap?
The amount of helium used in these drives is utterly insignificant. Congress liquidated the helium reserves on the assumption that the market would respond to shortages more effectively than bureaucrats. So far they have been right. Many gas wells that produce helium have be idled, both because of the low price of gas and the low price of helium. So plenty of helium is being "reserved" by leaving it in the ground. If you think you are smarter than the market, feel free to start your own stockpile. When you get rich, you can come back here, post a picture of your yacht, and say "See, I told you so!"
"One of the ultralight gases" - well, that narrows it down to H2 and He and nothing else, now, doesn't it? You left out that the candidate gas has to be very high in thermal conductivity as well, but both of those are so.
BTW, hydrogen is not higher density than helium. It is considerably lower. It would be more ideal than helium for this use if it weren't for its highly undesirable propensity to react with other substances.
We're not "running short" of helium. The ready supply of helium-rich natural gas is going to run out some time in the future, but so is the ready supply of just about everything else.
All the helium you could ever possibly want is in the atmosphere. 0.0005% by volume, or 0.00007% by mass, of the atmosphere is helium. The total mass of the atmosphere is 5x10^18 kg, so the total mass of the helium in the atmosphere is 3.5x10^12 kg. At STP (standard temperature and pressure), that represents 2x10^13 cubic meters.
That would fill 100 million Hindenburgs, or many trillion party balloons.
So no, even if/when the current sources of helium run out entirely, "all research into superconductivity" will NOT have to stop. It will "just" cost more.
The helium in the atmosphere is constantly escaping into space, and constantly being refreshed by escaping from the earth into the atmosphere. Inside the earth it is constantly being produced by nuclear processes.
Yes, it would be far more expensive to extract helium from the atmosphere at 0.0005% concentration than it is from natural gas sources at concentrations of from 0.1% to several %. But it is glaringly obvious that it is not impossible. The concentration of neon in the atmosphere is less than four times that of helium, and ALL the neon produced is produced by extracting it from the atmosphere.