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What provisions are there on restoring these Helium HDDs to working order 10+ years from now on? Helium will leak so that is an extra problem to deal with in p
by sireat 9y ago
What provisions are there on restoring these Helium HDDs to working order 10+ years from now on?
Helium will leak so that is an extra problem to deal with in preserving data.
Regular HDDs, replace a controller or even open up old HDDs and run them open in a clean room no problem.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wmf 9y agoBackups, backups, backups.
- nnleaf 9y agoI had a scare once and lost a few months worth of pictures. Glad it was only regular life instead of anything important, but that was what pushed me to always value backups and redundancy.
- labcomputer 9y agoIt might not be that bad, actually (unless you open it up). Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of a standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside).
- kogepathic 9y ago> Even cheap butyl gaskets will do a good job keeping out the constituents of a standard air mixture of gases. Any He leakage would thus cause a pressure differential, which will tend to prevent further outleakage of He (by countering the entropy gain from mixing He with the air outside). While this would probably be true for almost any other gas, Helium is devilishly small and can permeate through the metal over time. [0] [0] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-filled-10tb-harddrive/25/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/helium-filled-10tb-harddri...
- frik 9y agoWhat's the MTTF of HDDs filled with helium vs conventional HDDs? Do all 3 HDD manufacturers experiment with helium filled HDDs? Or have one or the other found a different method to innovate? (prefer HDDs that have MTTF of 7+ years)
- topspin 9y ago>> What provisions are there on restoring these Helium HDDs to working order 10+ years from now on? None. The He will leak and eventually positioning errors will become frequent if the drive stays in service long enough. It is not economically feasible to prevent the He diffusion. The drives are designed to lose He slowly enough to exceed their useful service life. The process was developed by HGST (now owned by WD) and it's called HelioSeal. The drive chassis is tin plated steel that is laser welded inside an He filled chamber creating a hermetically sealed enclosure. The pressure inside the enclosure is slightly lower than atmospheric, but He is still lost very slowly through diffusion. Given this process it's difficult to imagine a feasible repair technique; one would have to cut open the chassis and later reseal it in an He atmosphere. Something to consider; there is no means of restoring a flash cell to service after it's been worn out, yet that hasn't prevented widespread and highly successful Flash adoption. I doubt the unserviceable nature of Helium filled drives will impede adoption.