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Seagate Adopts Helium For a 10TB HDD (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Seagate has finally adopted helium as an inert gas in its data center drives and has used it to produce a 10TB HDD for cloud-based data centers. Seagate had relied on its shingled magnetic recording technology for high-capacity drives right up until its last 8TB HDD, even after WD has used helium in several iterations of its hermetically sealed, 3.5-in HDDs. The lighter-than-air helium reduces friction on platters and allows more to be used. In Seagate's new HDD, it crammed seven platters 14 heads, a 25% increase in disk density over its 8TB drive.
Can't wait to see the failure rate on this thing. How do they even get a hermetic seal?
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We need to assume that hydrogen will be the next element used for cooling? Or is it the end of spinning disc era?
Hydrogen is used, believe it or not, for generator cooling at power plants. Here is the quick link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Last time I bought a helium hard drive, it floated away and I never saw it again.
I know the idea sucks, perhaps the heads wouldn't fly as they need an "air" cushion?
I've heard Helium is a finite resource that we are rapidly depleting? I wonder how the use of it on such a large scale will impact the worldwide supply.
Two things I'll never willingly use.
Marginal increase in capacity for a major decrease in performance.
And to think the best thing I've adopted helium for is to sound like Elmo.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Why only cloud-based data centers? Are they not reliable enough for actual data centers?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Technically, the last Seagate 8TB drive was the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5, which is PMR, not SMR.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9577/seagate-announces-a-trio-of-8tb-drives-for-enterprise-applications
It's notoriously hard to keep helium inside of anything, so the seal would have to be good -- and they would have to vacate the air out of the drive interior before filling it with helium anyway. So why not just leave the interior of the drive in a vacuum?
Yes it's another failure mode that is going to give a harder limit on drive life than the current ones of spindle lubricant breaking down and polished surfaces fusing together. Seal things well and maybe they will last ten years before total failure, maybe only five, but a life of a few years is enough to bring them to market.
I wish I had thought of that. I've tried filling hard drives with various other elements... Lead, plutonium, vanadium. Drives failed miserably.
Worked for an measurement instrument company building instruments that had to work in helium atmosphere. We tried for a long time to seal the helium out. Even to the point of filling the entire inside with glass filled epoxy to prevent intrusions of helium. In the end we gave up, and did a redesign to work in helium. solid metal seals will work, but pretty much any other seal will not.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
It diffuses through metal because it is small. But not as small, nor as diffusion-prone as Hydrogen (which is diatomic btw).
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I don't like the idea of cramming platters to increase density because it throws a wrench in useful scaling relationship between density and I/O rate. I don't want a disk requiring days to sync up or otherwise doubles time needed to read out a given percentage of the disk. This is what archival media is for.
Would much rather see R&D efforts focused on increasing density and therefore I/O performance of individual platters otherwise for my purposes better off simply buying more and scaling out disks.
If helium increases reliability over long term use then great.. if it lasts only as long as the warrantee period I'm not interested.
Hoping against hope something not resembling vaporware will come out of RRAM efforts like crossbar in the next year or two.
...can you even hermetically seal helium? It will leak over time, slowly, no matter what.
What pressure were you working with? Helium will happily diffuse through metals but it is not going to draw a vacuum on itself. Yes the drives will leak gently, but it's not like a pressure vessel where which is literally constantly releasing a small stream of helium through the shell. HGST hermetically seal their drives after filling them with helium and claim the helium won't leak out within the expected lifetime of the drive (~10 years).
Sealing helium in ANYTHING for a significant amount of time is pretty much impossible. Helium is a monatomic gas. These drives will leak.
Planned Obsolescence.
If you have had hands-on experience with these things: do you have any idea how they handle pressure differences? Hard disk casings typically have flat sides, which are not ideal for handling pressure. In a pressurized airplane, you can have 0.3 bar pressire drop, which will exert about 30 kg of force on the walls. It's worse if they are shipped as unpressurozed cargo. So, the walls must be thicker than with a conventiomal HD, which conflicts with the goal of increasing the number of platters.
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With helium, 14 heads? Seagate?
That's just making me nervous even looking at it. They must have halved the MTTF for this piece of kit.
"Cloud-based" datacenters? So, what, these drives wouldn't be any good for the datacenter in the basement with no internet connection?
thank goodness we're not running out of Helium!
Since Lemmium is likely to be a noble gas, lets fill the drives with it. Sure, they'll be heavier, and some of your data might come out a little distorted, but it will last for 70 years in the most messed up, toxic environment imaginable.
So...it's a fancier, shinier disk I still won't buy. Seagate....ugh.
and the data comes out funny.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Can't wait to see the failure rate of these things, be it with helium or magical farts from unicorns fed nothing but shavings off philosopher's stones.
Redo your work with a more realistic model and you will get it. The thickness of the objects to be diffused through are non-zero.