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This seems like a terrible use of helium from a sustainability perspective. There are some things that helium is truly essential for, like low temperature cryog

This seems like a terrible use of helium from a sustainability perspective. There are some things that helium is truly essential for, like low temperature cryogenics and neutron detection. Our supply is finite and largely tied to natural gas reserves. When helium leaks out it floats into space and is gone forever. Why does the atmosphere in the drive absolutely have to be helium? Why not any other mix of inert gases at optimal pressure for a thin air cushion? Helium is also literally the leakiest thing you can try to contain. It will even diffuse out through the metal itself given enough time. Not trying to go full tinfoil hat here, but filling equipment with helium in this way seems like an effective way to cap drive life by time elapsed rather than amount of actual use.

abfan1127 6y ago
my first thought was what happens when it leaks out?
- r00fus 6y ago
  Sounds like planned obsolescence.
  - moonbug 6y ago
    This class of drive will typically have a design life of 5yrs at 100% duty.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      100% duty cycle on the spindle motors, perhaps. But they're definitely not rated for actively performing IO 100% of the time.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    It’s not planned obsolescence to include Helium when the medium requires it. If you want 18 TB, you’re going to need Helium (from what I know), but if you want less, you might not get it. Planned obsolescence is about planning (hence the name) to make a device worse to encourage upgrading. The device going bad after a while simply by its nature just makes the obsolescence aspect an added benefit. Is it planned obsolescence that alkaline batteries go bad if left unused for a while? That moving parts in a car can wear out? I wouldn’t say it is.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  If the internal pressure in the device is lower than one atm, the leakage is easier to contain because it's not helium wanting to go out, but air pushing to come in. Eventually it will happen and the internal drive atmosphere will be compromised to a point it doesn't work anymore. By then, it should be safe enough to open the drive in a clean Helium-filled room and reseal it. Or just read the data, store it someplace more durable, and put the drive in a museum.
  - 1996 6y ago
    So it becomes read only when helium leaks out?
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      I have no idea. May become unreadable if the head can't read because the disk is too far (or if it's too close and it crashes on the disk)
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      I though it would just lead to more heat, but reading this[1] from Seagate it seems indeed possible that the drive will not function if too much air gets in: Furthermore, the use of a higher number of thinner disks is not possible because the windage induces turbulence and makes 7200-RPM tracking impossible at the desired TPIs. The only way to reduce windage in air-filled HDDs is to significantly lower the spindle speed (RPM). However, the largest part of the business-critical market is not willing to accept lower RPMs due to the performance and throughput loss. This means that helium HDD technology is the only viable path forward for delivering higher capacities because it will allow for an increased number of thinner disks. That said, they also go into the efforts they do to seal the helium, so hopefully the helium stays put... [1]: https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd-10tb/_shared/docs/helium-drive-launch-tp686-1-1602us.pdf https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/en...
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        I'll interpret that as: The drive could be designed with a failsafe lower-RPM mode but it's not worth the engineering budget to allow more than one speed. Especially looking at WD's "5400 RPM Class" thing as evidence that it takes effort to change the speed of a drive.
sandworm101 6y ago
The amount used in these drives is minuscule, akin to a single party balloon. Given these drives are to be used for many years at a time, I'll go after them after I manage to stop all the birthday balloons.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Does anyone have a number on how much Helium is produced in the Earth's crust by radioactive decay?
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Not enough. It is generally known that we are using helium faster than the planet can naturally produce it. We currently get helium from natural gas deposits. In the future we might end up puling it from the air, but that would be very expensive. For many use cases it might be easier to switch to hydrogen. For those interested in SETI, excessive atmospheric helium might be a detectable techno-signature, a sign that someone is digging into deep crust presumably for hydrocarbons.
    - system2 6y ago
      When we use the reserves completely and prices sky rocket, probably unnecessary entertainment use of it would stop.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      I am sure we are using it faster than we are extracting it, and it'll be interesting to see what happens when selling hydrocarbons no longer offsets the cost of extracting it, but I was thinking about how much is actually produced.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  A party balloon full of helium is a minuscule amount?
  - 6y ago
tyingq 6y ago
Backblaze did a blog post about helium drives in 2018: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-failure-rates/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-fail... Some interesting stuff in there, like the SMART data element for helium status. And this quote, after they had 3 years in with helium drives: "To date only one HGST drive has reported a value of less than 100, with multiple readings between 94 and 99." But, then, later, this quote: "My prediction is that the helium drives will eventually prove to have a lower AFR. Why? Drive Days." Would be cool if a Backblaze employee could chime in with what they've seen since.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Would be cool if a Backblaze employee could chime in with what they've seen since. can't you check their follow-up reports they've posted? I believe that they break out AFR numbers by drive model so it shouldn't be too hard to separate out the helium drives from the normal drives.
yummypaint 6y ago
Thought i would expand on this with some order of magnitude leak rate guesses. For a standard small lab vacuum system with viton o-rings something like 10-7 mbarliters/sec (same as atmcc/sec) would be considered acceptable. Assuming the drive is pure helium at half pressure with this leak, the loss would be on the scale of 3 cc/year. The rate will decrease as the partial pressure decreases, but once this becomes significant im guessing the drive is already toast. I would also note that the helium will leak out before atmosphere leaks in. If the drives are well sealed they should fail due to lack of pressure causing head crash.
erk__ 6y ago
Tbh I would like to see some calculations of how much helium there is in the drive, a quick bit of napkin math makes it seem like you can make around 5*10^10 drives with the gas from a single field in the US on a single day, assuming that it is at 1 atm pressure, though I don't think that would move much more than one order of magnitude at most. Though your other point still stands.
rarefied_tomato 6y ago
Counterpoint: new large markets & high tech applications for helium will drive up the price. At this point consumers might scale back the balloons.
passivate 6y ago
What gas would you recommend and how does it compare? This would be easy to settle using data.
pengaru 6y ago
> Not trying to go full tinfoil hat here, but filling equipment with helium in this way seems like an effective way to cap drive life by time elapsed rather than amount of actual use. Recognizing planned obsolescence is not tinfoil hat territory. It's a rational and predictable commercial practice equivalent to rent-seeking, you're not crazy.
- xadhominemx 6y ago
  Hard disk drives are a commodity component and the main buyers of He nearline drives are the most sophisticated companies in the world. It’s not a trick dude.
xadhominemx 6y ago
Wow you should definitely reach out to the thousands of career hard disk engineers to inform them of your idea using different inert gases. They probably haven’t considered that one.
mlyle 6y ago
Note that right now we're burning the natural gas either way. How much of the helium we get out depends upon market use of natural gas, and market prices about whether we even bother to capture the helium from natural gas supplies that are rich in helium.
ridgeguy 6y ago
I think helium is used for its low kinematic viscosity. That lets the R/W head fly closer than, for example, air. The other inert gases (Ar, Ne, etc.) have KV values higher than air and would give no advantage. He is better for thermal reasons, too.

abfan1127 6y ago

my first thought was what happens when it leaks out?

r00fus 6y ago
Sounds like planned obsolescence.
- moonbug 6y ago
  This class of drive will typically have a design life of 5yrs at 100% duty.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    100% duty cycle on the spindle motors, perhaps. But they're definitely not rated for actively performing IO 100% of the time.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  It’s not planned obsolescence to include Helium when the medium requires it. If you want 18 TB, you’re going to need Helium (from what I know), but if you want less, you might not get it. Planned obsolescence is about planning (hence the name) to make a device worse to encourage upgrading. The device going bad after a while simply by its nature just makes the obsolescence aspect an added benefit. Is it planned obsolescence that alkaline batteries go bad if left unused for a while? That moving parts in a car can wear out? I wouldn’t say it is.
rbanffy 6y ago
If the internal pressure in the device is lower than one atm, the leakage is easier to contain because it's not helium wanting to go out, but air pushing to come in. Eventually it will happen and the internal drive atmosphere will be compromised to a point it doesn't work anymore. By then, it should be safe enough to open the drive in a clean Helium-filled room and reseal it. Or just read the data, store it someplace more durable, and put the drive in a museum.
- 1996 6y ago
  So it becomes read only when helium leaks out?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I have no idea. May become unreadable if the head can't read because the disk is too far (or if it's too close and it crashes on the disk)
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    I though it would just lead to more heat, but reading this[1] from Seagate it seems indeed possible that the drive will not function if too much air gets in: Furthermore, the use of a higher number of thinner disks is not possible because the windage induces turbulence and makes 7200-RPM tracking impossible at the desired TPIs. The only way to reduce windage in air-filled HDDs is to significantly lower the spindle speed (RPM). However, the largest part of the business-critical market is not willing to accept lower RPMs due to the performance and throughput loss. This means that helium HDD technology is the only viable path forward for delivering higher capacities because it will allow for an increased number of thinner disks. That said, they also go into the efforts they do to seal the helium, so hopefully the helium stays put... [1]: https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd-10tb/_shared/docs/helium-drive-launch-tp686-1-1602us.pdf https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/en...
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      I'll interpret that as: The drive could be designed with a failsafe lower-RPM mode but it's not worth the engineering budget to allow more than one speed. Especially looking at WD's "5400 RPM Class" thing as evidence that it takes effort to change the speed of a drive.

sandworm101 6y ago

The amount used in these drives is minuscule, akin to a single party balloon. Given these drives are to be used for many years at a time, I'll go after them after I manage to stop all the birthday balloons.

rbanffy 6y ago
Does anyone have a number on how much Helium is produced in the Earth's crust by radioactive decay?
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Not enough. It is generally known that we are using helium faster than the planet can naturally produce it. We currently get helium from natural gas deposits. In the future we might end up puling it from the air, but that would be very expensive. For many use cases it might be easier to switch to hydrogen. For those interested in SETI, excessive atmospheric helium might be a detectable techno-signature, a sign that someone is digging into deep crust presumably for hydrocarbons.
  - system2 6y ago
    When we use the reserves completely and prices sky rocket, probably unnecessary entertainment use of it would stop.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I am sure we are using it faster than we are extracting it, and it'll be interesting to see what happens when selling hydrocarbons no longer offsets the cost of extracting it, but I was thinking about how much is actually produced.
FooBarWidget 6y ago
A party balloon full of helium is a minuscule amount?
- 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago

Backblaze did a blog post about helium drives in 2018: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-failure-rates/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-fail... Some interesting stuff in there, like the SMART data element for helium status. And this quote, after they had 3 years in with helium drives: "To date only one HGST drive has reported a value of less than 100, with multiple readings between 94 and 99." But, then, later, this quote: "My prediction is that the helium drives will eventually prove to have a lower AFR. Why? Drive Days." Would be cool if a Backblaze employee could chime in with what they've seen since.

gruez 6y ago
>Would be cool if a Backblaze employee could chime in with what they've seen since. can't you check their follow-up reports they've posted? I believe that they break out AFR numbers by drive model so it shouldn't be too hard to separate out the helium drives from the normal drives.

yummypaint 6y ago

Thought i would expand on this with some order of magnitude leak rate guesses. For a standard small lab vacuum system with viton o-rings something like 10-7 mbarliters/sec (same as atmcc/sec) would be considered acceptable. Assuming the drive is pure helium at half pressure with this leak, the loss would be on the scale of 3 cc/year. The rate will decrease as the partial pressure decreases, but once this becomes significant im guessing the drive is already toast. I would also note that the helium will leak out before atmosphere leaks in. If the drives are well sealed they should fail due to lack of pressure causing head crash.

erk__ 6y ago

Tbh I would like to see some calculations of how much helium there is in the drive, a quick bit of napkin math makes it seem like you can make around 5*10^10 drives with the gas from a single field in the US on a single day, assuming that it is at 1 atm pressure, though I don't think that would move much more than one order of magnitude at most. Though your other point still stands.

rarefied_tomato 6y ago

Counterpoint: new large markets & high tech applications for helium will drive up the price. At this point consumers might scale back the balloons.

passivate 6y ago

What gas would you recommend and how does it compare? This would be easy to settle using data.

pengaru 6y ago

> Not trying to go full tinfoil hat here, but filling equipment with helium in this way seems like an effective way to cap drive life by time elapsed rather than amount of actual use. Recognizing planned obsolescence is not tinfoil hat territory. It's a rational and predictable commercial practice equivalent to rent-seeking, you're not crazy.

xadhominemx 6y ago
Hard disk drives are a commodity component and the main buyers of He nearline drives are the most sophisticated companies in the world. It’s not a trick dude.

xadhominemx 6y ago

Wow you should definitely reach out to the thousands of career hard disk engineers to inform them of your idea using different inert gases. They probably haven’t considered that one.

mlyle 6y ago

Note that right now we're burning the natural gas either way. How much of the helium we get out depends upon market use of natural gas, and market prices about whether we even bother to capture the helium from natural gas supplies that are rich in helium.

ridgeguy 6y ago

I think helium is used for its low kinematic viscosity. That lets the R/W head fly closer than, for example, air. The other inert gases (Ar, Ne, etc.) have KV values higher than air and would give no advantage. He is better for thermal reasons, too.