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I'm curious why helium would be used instead of a vacuum. I can imagine a vacuum would be difficult to maintain but would it be any worse than preventing helium
by dghughes 9y ago
I'm curious why helium would be used instead of a vacuum. I can imagine a vacuum would be difficult to maintain but would it be any worse than preventing helium from leaking out?
Helium is rare and critical for research and MRI machines it seems wasteful to use it in hard drives.
- ykler 9y agoHard drives need a gas because the heads use it to float over the platter. And helium is hardly that rare that it is an issue; it is used in balloons for children.
- lamynator 9y agoHelium used for balloons is low grade helium that has already been recovered from another process. Medical grade helium is virtually pure helium and that is in short supply. Question whether this HDD needs pure or low grade.
- hedora 9y agoThe heads actually fly over the platter, airplane style. Vacuum would make them crash. The molecules in the atmosphere are too big for the tolerances they need for the head to track properly, so they use Helium. Note this is a much less wasteful use case than children’s balloons. Also, modern MRI machines and other research equipment wouldn’t be feasible without massive amounts of storage to back them (though these drives are probably a poor fit for those use cases, since they are soft-realtime, and shingled drives can stall for a long time in the worst case).