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: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.

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.