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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.
All my audio files sound like "Tiny Tim"
helium, that is. invisible gold, Texas A (for Amarillo).
The most important question is what is the lifespan of the helium containment. Helium is notorious for getting in to and out of places that other elements can't. For example, in balloon borne cosmic ray experiments, or anything with a calorimeter or hodoscope that utilizes photomultiplier tubes, you have the problem of the helium from the balloon getting into the PMTs, which hold a vacuum. Of course, there are low pressure conditions to consider, but I'm still skeptical of the helium staying in the hard drive.
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
I ordered 6TB drives 3 hours ago...
Now all my MP3s sound like the Chipmunks!
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.
When these drives were first announced it was speculated that they would use heat-assisted magnetic recording, which could store a bit into a single magnetic grain rather than a domain consisting of hundreds of them. But it turned out that they used shingled magnetic recording instead, which seems to have less long-term promise. What's the news on HAMR? Is it still being pursued?
By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.
We are seeing the buggy whip manufacturers in full denial. 10TB drives should have been out a year ago, and consumer 6TB drives should be selling for under $100. The floods in Thailand gave platter drive makers an excuse to keep the prices (and profits) jacked up artificially while the insurance money replaced aging plants with the latest technology.
With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.
Helium is the second most common element in the universe. OK, there's not a lot on Earth... but it's easy to make.
You're missing the part where He is an inert monatomic gas -- since any pressure is created by how much helium you've got in that otherwise-vacuum, you'll find that the helium atoms, which can pretty much go anywhere they'll fit, will eventually find their way through the mass of other atoms bit by bit. They're small enough that they'll drift right through any "air pressure" as they can comfortably fit between most other gas molecules no matter how tightly they're packed together.
So it really all comes down to the seal: if they can get the seal to leave a gap no greater than two protons thick (He comes in stable isotopes of 1 or 2 neutrons), then no helium can escape. Good luck getting a seal that good though.
The truth is that statistically, most of the gas should stay inside the drive, but there will be constant loss, and eventually it will be enough that the gas cushion won't be enough to protect the platters and heads from collision.
BURMA SHAVE
Easy? Do you know how helium is produced? The helium we currently have access to is the result of Earth crust radioactive elements disintegration.
How do you think you gonna produce efficiently and in a cost effective manner He in volume? Tell us, I am very interested to start a business to produce it and I will give you half the shares for your effort.
Achille Talon
Hop!
It has to do with the actual atom sizes, not the fact the gas is inert.
Their goal is for lower friction which Helium provides.
Now Hydrogen could be quite interesting as a replacement..... :D
But helium filled disks will ensure an early end of life though. As there is basically nothing you can build that can contain it indefinetly..
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!"
Speak with the Qatarians:
"Air Liquide recently started up the world’s largest helium purification and liquefaction unit, a turnkey project at Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar. The new unit’s production capacity is approximately 38 million cubic meters of helium per year."
http://www.airliquide.com/en/q...
Do I get half the shares in your business?
I was also wondering this. Wouldn't nitrogen or argon/neon be cheaper?
The point of using helium is NOT that it is inert, but that it is low density (although the inertness is also nice). Neon is five times as dense and far more expensive. Methane is four times the density. The only gas lighter would be hydrogen. But hydrogen has a nasty habit of migrating through metal, leaking out, and embrittling the metal in the process. Low density gases reduce friction both through reduced mass, and a higher speed threshold for laminar (rather than turbulent) flow. Low density gases tend to also be better heat conductors, helping to keep the disk cool. That is why high density gases, like xenon or sulfer hexafloride, are used in insulated windows.
Yes I guess that is why a gas we can only mine tiny quantities of from natural gas reserves is currently being sold off for party balloon use.
Helium is being sold off at any bid price on the assumption that the stockpile is unlimited and needs to be liquidated. It's not being priced according to the long-term cost or capability of supplying the volumes that are being drawn from the stockpile on a sustainable basis, which is what you'd actually do if you were running a business dealing in actual production.
In the late 1960s, DDC of San Diego made head-per-track disk drives that operated with a helium atmosphere. These units had a cylinder of helium fastened to the baseplate (the units were 19" rack mount), and the documentation included procedures for replacing the cylinder and for purging from a full-sized cylinder if it was ever necessary to open the unit for repairs.
I had driven down to San Diego circa 1978 to buy a cylinder of refill helium from DDC for one of these in a hand-me-down system, but never got around to replacing the cylinder on the drive. The cylinder sat in my garage for years. Thirty years later I was a returned adult physics student. My professor was using a similar helium cylinder to purge a cryostat for a superconducting magnet. He ran out of helium, and the department had no other helium. I told him "wait 20 minutes, I'll be back." I retrieved the cylinder from my garage, and the professor was both delighted and baffled. When connected to the regulator, the cylinder proved to have maintained a remarkable fraction of its original pressure, and the professor was able to complete his procedure. Sadly, another part of the magnet failed and suffered a gas pressure explosion as it was being cooled.
In a remarkable coincidence, I noted that the department's helium cylinder and mine were identical, all the way down to a part number stenciled on them.
Helium balloons are a minor part of the overall picture. The overwhelming majority of uses are industrial, such as cryogenics. The problem is that they don't recover it. If you want to make a big impact on the helium consumption rate, hard drives is pretty much one of the least effective places you could focus - focus on industrial recovery.
Note that humans will never "run out" of helium. Even if we assume that space-based resource extraction becomes realistic, one can always refrigerate it out of the atmosphere. Or more accurately, refrigerate everything else out and leave the helium behind. There's only a tiny bit in the atmosphere, but for important uses it'll remain a possibility. I saw page that says that neon is $2 per liter. If you're refrigerating neon out of the atmosphere, pretty much all that's left is helium, so you're co-producing it, at a ratio of 3.5 to 1. If we assume that helium demand vastly outpaces neon demand, then the helium cost would be $7 per liter. And maybe less in mass production.
That's not really an absurd price for many uses - such as hard drives. On the other hand, it's dramatically more than today's prices at about $0.005 per liter! You're not going to be making helium blimps at $7 per liter. But if industry learns how to recapture and reuse, they should manage.
(Of course, humans probably wouldn't have to resort to helium extraction from the atmosphere for centuries, pretty much any gas coming out of the ground will be richer in helium than the air)
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
Maybe the lubrication would fail in vacuum?
Well, that would suck...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
If these signs / were here today / the final one / would likely say / Myanmar Shave
It's not being priced according to the long-term cost or capability of supplying the volumes that are being drawn from the stockpile on a sustainable basis, which is what you'd actually do if you were running a business dealing in actual production.
Yes, clearly all the people investing THEIR OWN MONEY are complete idiots, and you, a random guy on the internet, are so much smarter than actual investors and professional geologists. So does this mean you are going to invest all your money in helium futures, that are obviously going to be worth billions when the helium runs out, just like all the arm chair doomsayers are predicting?
Uh, no. Helium is one of the most common byproducts of nuclear decay. We just call it 'alpha particles'.
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
So how does that work?
So, let me guess. "Government IS the problem" right?
Government created the reserve. Government paid for the refining of He from natural gas in Texas, Oaklahoma and Louisiana.
Government found the program was 1.2 billion in debt.
Government handed the business to Private Enterprise
Private enterprise sold the product dirt cheap (they didn't inherit the outstanding debt, yet another Pro-Capitalist giveaway).
and now, somehow, it is Congress fault?
So how does that work?
The helium in the atmosphere slowly dissipates into space. But it is also replenished by helium leaking out of the ground, where it is generated by radioactive elements emitting alpha particles (which are helium nuclei). At about 5.5 ppm, the source and drain are in equilibrium.
I suppose it's going to be a while before we run out of alpha emitters. So the Wikipedia page is wrong then, when it says Helium is a finite resource. Last time I trust Wikipedia (yeah right:).
You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.
According to this (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. The National Helium Reserve is 1e9 m^3. So, extracting all of the Helium from the atmosphere before it escapes, it would take 1e9 m^3 / (3e5 cm^3/s), or over 100 years to replace the reserves.
But extracting all of it is hopelessly unrealistic. I don't know, but it seems even 1% would be ambitious. So now we're looking at tens of thousands of years.
So either the national reserve is ridiculously large, or removing it from the atmosphere is not going to be a solution to the shortage. Right? Or am I missing something (else)?
Give me a break.
411 voted Yea, including 180 democrats.
Only 10 democrats voted Nae.
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
This is the very definition of a bi-partisan bill. Your attempt to demonize the republican party and therefor cast your party, the democrats, as some kind of protector of the people is a joke. The democrats are just as corrupt as the republicans. And... this wasn't a bad bill anyway! The US government shouldn't have control over the entire supply of an Element!
Is that different from weapons-grade helium?
Part balloon helium raises your voice.
A weapons grade helium bomb raises the voices of everyone in a five mile area to the point that it's above the human hearing range, thus disabling the enemy's communications.
Obviously, we need to watch out for potential terrorists in the form of people holding balloons.
Don't even get me started on the weapons-grade ice cream and the disabling headaches is causes.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
In case you haven't stopped by Newegg lately, look at the reviews for all 1TB drives. It's like 95% positive. Look at the reviews for any model 2TB drive from any manufacturer. Across the board they're HORRIBLE! It makes it seem like the DoA numbers are between 50% and 75%. Some people said they ordered 2, got them both DoA, then got 1 DoA out of the two replacements. Tons of other people claim that they failed within 3 months. Now look at the 3Tb and 4TB drives. Horrible again!
So apparently after making 1TB drives, Seagate and WD forgot how to make hard drives. I wouldn't buy one of these 8TB or 10TB drives for any reason because I expect the exact same thing to happen to them.
I doubt this is actually true. This may be the official line from management but having several relatives who work in hospitals one of whom works in the maintenance area it seems this should be treated similarly to all other statements from the piss poor managers at hospitals, aka 100% Grade A USDA certified BS. If this were true you are telling me that the hospital is willing to risk damaging a machine that is in the 1/2 to 2 million dollar range by not doing maintenance to try and save maybe a couple of hundred dollars on helium. Mangers have tried to create similar situations at the hospital my father worked but once they get up to higher levels quickly get sorted out since the low level management likes to fight over their little fiefdoms and bonuses. This seems to stem from the fact that the biomedical technicians managers don't understand that the biomeds were a cost center and would try to cut costs so that the department would show a profit.
Of the more notable instances one was when the manager tried to cut back on the amount of hose for they were buying for the anesthesia machines since they were buying a fairly substantial amount of it. The problem is that it has to be replaced periodically and they know how many anesthesia machines the hospital has so they were basically replacing what they used and keeping a fairly small reserve. Then there was the pissing contest another manager of the biomeds got into with a manager of the surgery department over if some expensive device should be repaired (cost comes out of the biomeds department) or replaced (cost comes out of the surgery department). To repair the device was something like $1000 in parts but replacing it was over $70,000 and this got escalated up to the directors over the course of a couple of weeks.
I have a feeling that your situation will turn out much the same way once low level managers get slapped around a bit by upper managers who's fiefdoms include the whole hospital and would rather not buy and new MRI machine because maintenance was not done on their already existing and functional one.
Time to offend someone