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6TB helium-filled hard drives bump capacity, decrease power use
- deletes 13y agoNotice on the packaging says: If you start talking with a high pitched voice, replace the unit immediately. EDIT: It's a joke, lighten up people..., cause you will with this drive :) EDIT2: And in the case the drive fails, just open it and get a guaranteed 1 minute of fun.
- petercooper 13y agoAh, I was going to make a joke about whether these drives would sound all squeaky and weird, but I think you indirectly beat me to it :-)
- legulere 13y agoIf I would want a comment thread full of jokes I would go to reddit.
- NKCSS 13y agoThis is pretty cool, but I assume the increase in productional complexity means consumers won't benefit from this for quite some time.
- wmf 13y agoIt's either cheaper or it isn't. I don't understand this "but you make it up in volume" logic.
- Synaesthesia 13y agoIt's cheaper to make a greater volume of a product since you pay once for tools and your factory, which can make any amount of a product.
- frozenport 13y agoLike everybody who uses Netflix?
- steeve 13y agoHonest question: if air friction reduction is so important, then why not push for zero pressure drives?
- pjc50 13y agoSome pressure is required to keep the head flying above the surface of the drive. Removing all gas from the drive gives you a very nasty z-axis control problem.
- tlrobinson 13y agoI wonder if hard drives were part of Elon Musk's inspiration for the Hyperloop skids.
- maxerickson 13y agoYou would need much better seals to resist the pressure difference.
- venomsnake 13y agoAir pressure is 1kg/cm^2 ... so you will need to make a hdd that can operate under 400 kg of external load. Getting to the point of vacuum is expensive too. And hdd already require enormously precise manufacturing process.
- eksith 13y agoSame reason the US flag was 'flapping' in the 'wind' on the Moon. ;) Without any air, there's nothing to stop the head from travelling without running into control issues. The gas molecules actually act as a buffer preventing too much movement. The head will flap about with the slightest motion like a flag in a vacuum.
- venomsnake 13y agoWhy not hydrogen? We are running out of helium. And it is in such minuscule amounts the fire safety should not be a concern, and for most of the stuff inside the drive hydrogen is chemically inert enough.
- JanezStupar 13y agoBecause you at the very least you are going to have problems keeping the hydrogen inside the drive. And there are probably even worse potential issues that my absolute lack of chemistry and materials knowledge can not predict.
- pjc50 13y agoHydrogen is notoriously good at diffusing through seals, and even through metal. Negative internal pressure does make this harder, but it might be a problem. Handling hydrogen is generally a hassle, so it was probably chosen to make life easier/cheaper at the factory.
- mistercow 13y ago>Hydrogen is notoriously good at diffusing through seals So is helium. That's why you can't cash in on the impending global helium shortage by buying up helium tanks.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWe could always just Kickstarter a fund to buy the US government storage facility.
- Osmium 13y ago> Hydrogen is notoriously good at diffusing through seals, and even through metal. Exactly this. Efficient hydrogen storage is a huge open research question. Even keeping the helium sealed can be difficult enough.
- FooBarWidget 13y agoCan't people transmute some helium?
- ck2 13y agoWait for 60TB HAMR http://storageeffect.media.seagate.com/files/2012/03/perphamr2.gif http://storageeffect.media.seagate.com/files/2012/03/perpham... Netflix, which uses HGST high-capacity hard drives in its data centers I thought Netflix uses Amazon AWS ?
- cowsandmilk 13y agoprobably talking about the openconnect CDN, which I don't believe is AWS based. One of the options for openconnect is for the machines to be hosted at the ISP, so that part definitely is not AWS.
- cweaver 13y agoPart of their CDN uses custom boxes based off Backblaze pods. http://gigaom.com/2012/06/06/why-netflixs-cdn-should-scare-the-storage-industry/ http://gigaom.com/2012/06/06/why-netflixs-cdn-should-scare-t...
- selmnoo 13y agoAre HAMR drives commercially available yet? Wiki makes it sound like 60TB HAMR drives will be readily available at low cost for consumers by 2016 or so, do you think that's likely the reality of things?
- ck2 13y agoSeagate is suggesting the first HAMR drive will be a 3.5 inch Barracuda of 7.5TB I think they are taking it gradually. The problem with HAMR is evaporation of the surface film.
- jodrellblank 13y agoAmazing technology in due in 3-5 years? Probably not.
- jonknee 13y agoFor computing power, it would be ridiculously expensive to try and use AWS to stream all their video.
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- todayiamme 13y agoI would like to understand why they are using helium at all instead of a several other plausible alternatives. The article offers the following rationale for using helium in this capacity; >>>At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.<<< This appears to be a slight misunderstanding as the density of any gas is variable and we have found that it is directly proportional to the unit weight of the substance, the pressure and inversely proportional to temperature. It is not fixed. They could have easily achieved the result in multiple ways. For instance, to reduce density it might have been easier to simply reduce pressure and then create a hermetically sealed chamber with a reasonably inert gas with low atomic or molecular mass such as nitrogen. This should have saved them a lot of trouble as helium is actually pretty hard to contain. An alternative nitrogen based solution would also have been good enough for a long enough period of time and it could have been achieved in a much less expensive manner. (they say in the article that successfully trapping helium for a long enough period of time required a decade of research. This is a relatively solved problem for gases such as nitrogen) I am sure that the people at Western Digital can see something that I don't - I'm just curious as to what that insight is. What makes helium worth all of the trouble?
- adrianb 13y agoI'm guessing the fact that it's an inert gas is important as it won't be a risk (in case of fire or toxicity) in case the enclosing is broken. Also I think the density was presumed to be at room temperature, reasonable pressure. Under these circumstances He might provide the least drag. Having a pressurized enclosure might make the drive more expensive as stronger materials need to be used, and it would also make it more dangerous in case of mishandling, so I think there was a limited range of pressure they could maintain in the enclosure.
- todayiamme 13y agoNitrogen is also inert enough for such use, it's easily contained and it doesn't require such measures. >>>Having a pressurized enclosure might make the drive more expensive as stronger materials need to be used, and it would also make it more dangerous in case of mishandling<<< Actually containing He at all would require these measures anyway, as He diffuses through solids much faster than air and as such cannot be easily contained. To quote the wikipedia article; >>>One industrial application for helium is leak detection. Because helium diffuses through solids three times faster than air, it is used as a tracer gas to detect leaks in high-vacuum equipment (such as cryogenic tanks) and high-pressure containers. The tested object is placed in a chamber, which is then evacuated and filled with helium. The helium that escapes through the leaks is detected by a sensitive device (helium mass spectrometer), even at the leak rates as small as 10−9 mbar·L/s (10−10 Pa·m3/s). The measurement procedure is normally automatic and is called helium integral test. A simpler procedure is to fill the tested object with helium and to manually search for leaks with a hand-held device. Helium leaks through cracks should not be confused with gas permeation through a bulk material. While helium has documented permeation constants (thus a calculable permeation rate) through glasses, ceramics, and synthetic materials, inert gases such as helium will not permeate most bulk metals.<<< Further, high pressure containers are dangerous as they might have an outward failure. That is unlikely to be the case with a drive that is at say .5 atm as the pressure is directed inwards, so the worst case over is most probably a drive filled with air or a slightly crumpled drive. (as a thought experiment think about how submarines implode instead of exploding when the hull encounters pressures beyond what it can handle)
- powertower 13y agoWhat was the major issue with sealing He in a HD that it took 10 years to figure out?
- DanBC 13y agoIt's very hard to keep helium in anything. Hard drives are not sealed, they have (filtered) holes to allow for expansion / contraction of the internal atmosphere caused by heating / cooling cycles. Helium is not a renewable resource, and we're running out. I keep on thinking that we've reached the limits of traditional drives, and hoping that we dump a lot of investment into SSDs and new SSD architecture. It just feels weird to have something so mechanical in a computer.
- relix 13y agoTheoretically we're running out of Helium, just like we're theoretically running out of oil, but actually we've still got plenty left. Because of the US dumping their stocks the price has been artificially low making it unprofitable to extract from natural gas which contains a lot, and it has been just released in the atmosphere because of that instead of contained. As soon as prices start to reflect the extraction price there won't be a problem anymore.
- mnw21cam 13y agoThis makes me wonder if these new hard drives will have a limited shelf life. I know they have spent so much research on keeping the He in, but it's more likely that they have just slowed down the leaking, so will this hard drive still be spinning in ten years? Some hard drives are expected to keep running for at least that long. Also, I worry about air pressure changes. If a particularly nasty weather system came along with a very low pressure centre, and the hard drive is completely sealed, then it will have to either flex to accommodate the He expansion or be very rigid indeed. If it flexes, does that de-calibrate the head alignment? Is the case strong enough to deal with 200N force pulling it apart?
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- ChuckMcM 13y agoI suppose that if they are sure they can hold the gas in the chamber for at least 3 years (typical depreciation rate for drives) they will do fine. It will give a challenge to the data recovery guys, now having to run the drives in a helium sealed working chamber.
- marcosdumay 13y agoIt will also reduce the lifetime of disks, making the best case near the average. That may not be much of a problem for medium and large business, but small business and consumers won't like the trend.
- ars 13y agoIt won't affect them. The point is to reduce power consumption and put the platters closer together. Neither of those are a problem for data recovery.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoI am looking for a term - a good word for the feeling I got reading this article. It's a bit like the Iain Banks term "swim" - the lizard brain feeling for a human on a distant planet suddenly wondering how it got here I am looking for a term describing the realisation that your toolset is ridiculously, hopelessly inadequate. I have happily taken hard disks apart and pulled at the heads and platters and thought "I have seen therefore I understand" - and it's articles like this that give me $TERM - the feeling that I have seen, I have had the Press Release explanation, but I am not even close to seeing or understanding
- HCIdivision17 13y agoAhh, thanks for reminding me of that term; I've desperately had it on the tip of my mind for a few days now!
- muloka 13y agoHopefully this doesn't accelerate the likelihood of a helium shortage. Helium, as a abundant as it is in the universe, it is a finite and important resource on the earth. A lot of scientific and medical equipment depends on it.
- lostlogin 13y agoVaguely related - super conduction at warm temperatures (haha, it's still pretty chilly around those windings but liquid nitrogen isn't too expensive) isn't too far off according to MRI manufactures and the various articles I have seen here in recent times. At $100k ish per quench, the service contracts sure looks like a good option when you have 3 or 4 of them in a year!
- dfrey 13y agoThe thing that jumped to my attention was that this drive has 7 platters. I've heard that as platters go up reliability goes down. Can anyone who knows more about disks comment on this?
- ksec 13y agoSeagate are going to ship SMR HDD in the next 6 months. With BPM is still way off on any RoadMap.( Correct me if i am wrong ) The other alternative is HAMR. But do HAMR works with Helium Filled HDD? My imagination is that the laser in HAMR would set off Rampant fire. And to be Honest, even with that theoretical 50 - 60TB HDD from HAMR HDD isn't enough to fit our Cloud Platform needs. The amount of data we create everyday and Backups we need. Do we have anything in research for an HDD that is capable of 100- 1000TB?
- pjc50 13y agoYou are mistaking helium (inert,fire suppresant) for hydrogen (flammable).