Western Digital Announces World's First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive (techgage.com)

Deathspawner writes: Western Digital today announced a new, helium-filled enterprise HDD that allows for 10TB capacities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). WD's latest enterprise drive, sold as the HGST Ultrastar He10, uses the PMR storage method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive.

Comments

Just one problem:

[Locke2005]

All the audio tracks you store on the drive sound really high-pitched and squeaky when you play them back...

Seems legit

[ShaunC]

Tethering yourself to a bunch of helium-filled drives is a great way to get into the cloud.

Re:Seems legit

[Rakarra]

It makes for racks of drives very easy to move from one side of a data center to the other.

Great until we run out of Helium

[jfdavis668]

We keep finding new uses for Helium, but not new supplies.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop promoting this myth.

From http://geology.com/articles/helium/

Some natural gas fields have enough helium mingled with the gas that it can be extracted at an economical cost. A few fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume. Companies that drill for natural gas in these areas produce the natural gas, process it and remove the helium as a byproduct

And by 'byproduct' they mean blow it to the wind without a second thought. That's 7% helium by volume, just dumped as we type. Do you think the world's party balloons (or fractional amounts in hds) even come close to this volume?

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[aicrules]

and suddenly slashdot was silent.....

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[tibit]

Purifying helium is not hard: everything else condenses out way before it does. You just blow "dirty" helium over a sufficiently cold heat exchanger, and everything other than helium will condense on the heat exchanger. See e.g. this excellent reference.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

So here's how it works.

Someone poorly versed in science invents a disaster scenario. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and dismiss the argument as no solid evidence was presented, and speculation isn't the thing they're interested in, so they stop paying attention. Some politician sees the opportunity, and writes legislation that, what a coincidence, happens to benefit some of his donors while mandating that people give up just a little to avert this alleged disaster.

As a claimed result of these actions, disaster is averted, and anyone actually interested in science and evidence who finally hears about the law and complains is clearly a denier, or works for some evil corporations (you can tell the evil ones because they don't donate to said politician).

So, no, I'm not interested in buying your tiger rock without some evidence of tigers in the neighborhood, and the tiger-deterring effectiveness the rock. Even though I accept certain existence of tigers in the world, that's not really the important fact here.

It's the same pet peeve I have about low-flow toilets madated nation-wide:
1) Prove there's a need to conserve water where I live
2) Prove that the amount of water used in toilets is non-trivial
3) Prove that this solution significantly reduces the amount of water used in toilets.

If you can't prove all three, fuck off with low-flow toilets.

So, again, the burden of proof is on you that (1) we stand any real chance of exhausting the Earths helium supply before fusion is easy (or grabbing it from off-planet, but that seems further out), and (2) the thing you want to ban is a significant contributor to the problem, and (3) the ban will actually work to achieve that goal, unlike say drug laws.

I've never seen any evidence for (1), and I not seeing how (2) would apply to hard drives. (3) I'll give you.

Re:Great until we run out of Helium

[lgw]

There's a need to conserve helium because it's non-renewable.

That's not important. Everything is non-renewable on some scale. Solar power is not renewable on some scale. Fusion is non-renewable on some scale. That's not the question I asked. You answered the question you liked, instead of the question I asked. Did you think I wouldn't notice?

I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out

So, for any specific thing you want to address, you still need to demonstrate that that specific thing is worthwhile. If helium becomes scare, the price will rice, and people will use less. Until you prove (1), I'm free to assume that people will just produce more (since they're venting it anyway right now), and so demand will be met with new supply, just as it is with, oil, natural gas, food, and basically everything else people have been predicting we'd run out of for the last 150 years.

Helium

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't helium leak out of things shockingly quickly? What's the expected lifetime of the helium within the drive, and when will it stop operating with... whatever helium adds to the equation, here?

Re:Helium

[coolmoe2]

I know its uncool to RTFA here but I think this was notable.

"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"

So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.

Re:Helium

[plover]

The MTTF makes a big difference to large installations. (I don't know what MTFB is besides a typo in the article -- Mean Time to Fail Badly, perhaps? In any case, MTTF is the better measure of hard drives as they're pretty much not worth repairing, as MTBF would measure.)

We have one installation that operates 60,000 hard drives that spin a total of 24*60000 = 1,440,000 hours per day. A MTTF of 2.5 million hours means I can expect one of these drives to fail every other day. While that would be much better than our current rate of 12 failures per day, and would save us a lot of money on maintenance contracts, it doesn't mean the drives are impervious to failure. It just means that their failures are less expensive than our current drives.

I also have a hard time believing any disk manufacturer's claims for longevity, because we often prove them wrong. We bought a handful of "enterprise class" drives for a dozen workstations that claimed a 1.2 million hour MTTF. We had 8 out of 24 drives fail within 50,000 hours (5 years), for an actual MTTF of less than 150,000 hours (the failures happened after burn-in but before the 5 year mark, which is when the machines were replaced.) Claims of 2.5 million hours MTTF just don't ring true.

Re:Helium

[fnj]

2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.

MTBF is NOT the same as expected/rated life. To equate the two is the oldest, most naive misconception in the book. MTBF gives the number of drive-hours between failures, IN A LARGE POPULATION of FRESH drives. For a 2.5 million hour MTBF, if you have 10,000 drives operating, then you expect one failure every 2500 hours. That's 3-1/2 months. Right from the beginning. It does not account for wear. In fact, the failure rate function will not be a straight line. It will rise as the drives age. When the failure rate read off that line becomes very large, you have reached the limit on expected life.

Expected/rated life is determined by analyzing wear factors. They usually don't spec this figure to the user, but it is well known to be on the order of 5 years for a good quality drive that is not probing some kind of new territory in terms of design/technology.

Just for one example of how/why the drive wears out, consider the spindle bearings. They are prelubricated. That lubrication does not last forever, and there are no "oil here" stickers. Helium leakage is just another, new factor to add to all the other wear factors that drives are subject to.

Re:Helium

[Seraphim1982]

Then you are not worried about helium leaking. You're worried about oxygen and nitrogen leaking in. Thankfully those are all WAY easier to stop then helium, and a properly designed device shouldn't have trouble.

Re:Helium

[suutar]

less dense gas also provides less of a cushion for the drive heads. Lose too much and you get head crashes.

SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[foxalopex]

I have an SMR 8TB Seagate drive which is marked as an archival drive. It's worked well so far. The problem with Shingle Magnetic Recording drives which I have noticed is that occasionally the drive will "stall" while it rearranges data. This is probably extremely bad for some raid systems as the paranoid ones might think the drive has prematurely died. Still this drive was inexpensive for its size and stores a LOT of data which is handy for backing up my actual RAID NAS system. Just don't use a drive like this in your Raid or you might run into serious problems.

I worry about these helium drives leaking their helium eventually and dying. They claim to have a sealed unit where the seal will last for years which is hopefully the case but you never know...

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[JoeyRox]

Currently SMR implementations increase density by only 30%. IMO that's not worth the performance trade-off for anything other than pure archival/backup applications.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[gstoddart]

From what I've seen over the years, there's always someone for whom storage density is always a plus, no matter the cost.

The rest of us thank them and wait until the price comes down.

I figure right now, someone with highly specific storage needs is trying to see how soon they can get these.

Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use

[Lumpy]

They will last as long as the warranty, and if not, here's a refurb for you!

Re:Helium -- why not H2?

[Sir Holo]

I agree that Hydrogen sounds like a better approach.

1) orders of magnitudes cheaper
2) even less dense
3) much larger molecules, so leakage should be far less

Not inert, true, but that should be possible to deal with.

Nice thought on #2, but incorrect. Hydrogen diffuses through steel quite quickly.

Hydrogen is the bane of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) systems, which have stainless steel walls 1/2 to 1 inch in thickness. New system? Hydrogen comes out of the steel itself, as it contains some. But with time, that might be depleted, but no —more comes in from the atmosphere, or from any replaced components or new seals.

For UHV systems, helium is quite useful for finding leaks. Microscopic or even nanoscopic pathways for the helium atoms to make their way in. One frequently has poor base vacuum, and must hunt around blowing helium on suspected parts. These could be anything: micro-crack in a weld, stress-crack in a feed-through, an improperly bolted seal, a loose bolt. It can get very fiddly.

depends on pressure difference, which can be zero

[raymorris]

The permeation rate of helium is roughly:

diffusion rate of seal material / thickness of material * time * pressure difference

The pressure difference term can be made approximately zero using a diaphragm to allow for changes in atmospheric pressure. Any value * 0 = 0, so permeation (leakage) is roughly zero.

Additionally, some seal materials work quite well. But again that's easy when the inside and outside are the same pressure - there's nothing causing the helium to exit, even if it could pass through easily.

Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum?

[DCFusor]

The real reason is that the heads need some medium to "fly" on. When they rub the disk surface, it's called a crash for a reason.

Re:No thanks...

[blind biker]

You are right - partial pressure in the atmosphere is extremely low, so the helium will leak out. The seals have to be made to much more stringent standards in order to keep He in the drive, but that won't help for long. It will, however, keep nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 from entering the drive. Essentially, you will end up with a drive filled with very low pressure helium - essentially, vacuum, and the heads will have crashed against the surface of the platters long before that.

More fracking means less He

[dlenmn]

The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies -- which is not something you refuted. You quoted something about known supplies. It could well be that the GP's claim is true. Most of our *new* natural gas supplies are from fracking, which results in very little helium.

Moreover, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. You note that, "*A few* fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume," and then make the unsubstantiated claim that none of this He is recovered (which, if true, would prove what, exactly?) and that these few fields contain more than enough He for everyone. Citations please! The fact is that He prices are going up, and Econ 101 says the cause is demand increasing faster than supply.

Re:depends on pressure difference, which can be ze

[fnj]

Wrong. Diffusion depends on the PARTIAL pressure difference of the helium. For helium at one atmosphere on one side, and the atmosphere itself on the other side, the partial pressure difference is one full atmosphere.