back to article Helium HDD prices rise way above air-filled spinning rust

A 6TB Helium-filled drive from HGST costs $120 more than a traditional 6TB drive from Seagate. Analyst haus Stifel Nicolaus' MD, Aaron Rakers, interviewed Seagate’s CFO, Pat O’Malley, and noted afterwards that Seagate estimated an approximate $30/drive extra cost versus traditional air-filled drives. Rakers notes the “HGST (WD …

  1. Zog The Undeniable

    How do they keep the helium in?

    Two problems spring to mind:

    1. HDDs usually have a filtered breather hole to cope with the innards heating up during use. So this one must be built to cope with pressure changes.

    2. According to a former student colleague who has worked at BOC these last 25 years, helium is notoriously hard to contain (unlike hydrogen, it's a single-atom molecule and can squeeze through the smallest gap). So even a "hermetically sealed" (see 1 above) drive casing is hard to design as you need special helium-proof gaskets where the case is screwed together, unless they are literally welding it shut.

    Get the above wrong and it reverts to an air-filled enclosure (or a partial vacuum when cold, as the heated helium escapes) fairly quickly. Must be a real design headache.

    1. 's water music

      Re: How do they keep the helium in?

      Get the above wrong and it reverts to an air-filled enclosure (or a partial vacuum when cold, as the heated helium escapes) fairly quickly. Must be a real design headache.

      c'mon how is the mark^H^H^H^H customer going to be able to tell (apart from their balance sheet)

      1. frank ly

        Re: How do they keep the helium in?

        I think I read (can't rememebr where, it may have been speculation) that there's a small metal bellows (like an accordion) with a case breather hole leading to one side of it and the helium filled innards on the other side.

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: How do they keep the helium in?

      "unless they are literally welding it shut."

      ...and it still needs gaskets where the power and data enters the "sealed" unit. We can only assume at this stage that the leakage is low enough to last the expected life of the unit. Or at least until the warranty expires :-)

  2. returnmyjedi

    Considering there's only two out three more decades' worth of helium floating about in the wild, I've always found the use of it in drives to be a bit indulgent and irresponsible. There are far more important uses for this finite resource such as cooling magnets in MRI scanners, and for bribing my daughter when used to fill up Peppa Pig balloons.

    1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Try reading anything by Tim Worstall

      The size of a resource is usually estimated as some multiple of the reserve, and the size of the reserve is set by the market. If a new use for helium is discovered, more will be trapped from oil wells, the reserve will increase, and we will have two or three decades of the resource again.

    2. Jan 0 Silver badge

      When the helium runs out, we could use hydrogen instead. Probably a bit harder to contain than helium - I remember that it diffuses through steel at a much higher rate. Embrittlement is probably not a problem. Viscosity is still going to be much lower than air. Hydrogen only gets scarce near to the heat death of the universe, so our grandchildren won't run short of it.

    3. MachDiamond Silver badge

      The Helium on Earth isn't just "floating around". There isn't enough gravity to keep it in the atmosphere. Helium is found in underground reservoirs and much of that in Texas. It occurs as a byproduct of nuclear decay. An Alpha Particle is an ionized Helium atom. It finds a couple of electrons that nobody is guarding too closely and whalla, a stable He atom.

      He is much like crude oil. There is a finite amount available in recoverable reservoirs and it's created very slowly in comparison to our rate of usage. He is useful for cooling of sensors and superconductivity applications and also in rocketry where it's low mass and compatibility with liquid Oxygen make it ideal. Airships and Zuckerdude/Bozos Wi-Fi balloons floated over unstable countries are a massive waste of a limited resource.

      I have mixed feelings over party balloons. I earned an income delivering balloon bouquets as a 6' rabbit when I was in high school. One can get away with a lot while wearing a rabbit costume and carrying a couple of dozen balloons. I sure did. Being allowed in to a women's dorm is a piece of cake.

      Hard drives? Honestly, spinning rust is the modern day equivalent of buggy whip. As SSD's become better and cheaper, the need for the common standard hard drive will dwindle away and the last company producing them will be selling the finest state of the art HD of its kind. I'm sure the last maker of buggy whips in large volumes was making the very best. I'd suggest to HDD manufacturers to give up on He filled drives and use the money in R&D of the next solid state storage platform.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Headmaster

        "and whalla"

        Did you mean "et voilà!"?

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          Pretty sure you can produce He in nuclear reactors, too, cracking Li for example.

      2. Vic

        The Helium on Earth isn't just "floating around". There isn't enough gravity to keep it in the atmosphere.

        Really? What gives it upthrust once it reaches the edge of the atmosphere, then?

        There is a finite amount available in recoverable reservoirs

        There's still plenty. The amount used in hard drives won't make any difference to world stocks.

        Vic.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          "Really? What gives it upthrust once it reaches the edge of the atmosphere, then?"

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape

    4. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "Considering there's only two out three more decades' worth of helium floating about in the wild"

      If LFTRs take off, there will be more helium available than we know what to do with.

  3. Callam McMillan

    I think the biggest price differentiator is that one is a Seagate, and therefore indistinguishable from a steaming pile of manure; the other is from a reasonably decent maker of drives that should be able to store your data without dying a horrible death.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Um..TCO???

    Scale He Vs air drives at data centre quantities and the savings on power and cooling make the issue of purchase price differential a no-brainer.

  5. Sebastian Brosig
    Boffin

    HE6

    It's pricey because they use extremely exotic Helium-6, not only expensive but also it decays into Lithium with a half-life of about 800ms. Ordinary He4 would do for me.

    1. the spectacularly refined chap

      Re: HE6

      He^6, not He[6]...

  6. Truth4u

    A 6TB Helium-filled drive from HGST costs $120 more than a traditional 6TB drive from Seagate.

    Because Seagate drives are crap

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A 6TB Helium-filled drive from HGST costs $120 more than a traditional 6TB drive from Seagate.

      Beat me to it.

      If I were still using spinning rust in anger I'd happily pay extra for something that, y'know, works.

    2. Karl Austin

      Re: A 6TB Helium-filled drive from HGST costs $120 more than a traditional 6TB drive from Seagate.

      To be fair, the SATA ones are crap. The SAS such as Cheetah are actually pretty decent.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: A 6TB Helium-filled drive from HGST costs $120 more than a traditional 6TB drive from Seagate.

        "The SAS such as Cheetah are actually pretty decent."

        Um, no. Seriously. Just NO.

        I have Cheetahs in service. Not for much longer with any luck.

        More to the point, HGST drives of any given size are more expensive than Seagate and there's a reason for that which makes people willing to pay the premium.

  7. Little Mouse

    Are they any good though?

    I thought the whole point of the helium was to enable the use of more platters - i.e. obtain larger capacity drives. So apart from situations where being airtight is a requirement, why choose an expensive 6TB helium drive over a non-helium alternative? Do they have better power use, MTBF etc?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Zog The helium can escape straight though the metal of the enclosure, even welding it shut wouldn't be enough to keep it in forever. Having said that you'd got to think about pressure differentials. Assuming the enclosure is very well sealed and the helium is at roughly atmospheric pressure it's not really got much driving force to escape and the surrounding air shouldn't be able to get back in. Presumably there's some sort of bladder in the device to deal with internal changes in pressure due to heating but that wouldn't work terribly well with helium. It might be better to just let a bit escape when the drive warms up and then deal with the slight vacuum when it cools down.

    As for running out of helium because we are using it in drives and balloons well I wouldn't believe everything to read in the newspapers. Yes we are running down our global stockpiles of helium but those stockpiles were a bit of an anomaly. With the increase in gas production we are seeing we should be able to get more helium when we need it and if we ever get fusion power working properly we'll all be walking around with squeaky voices (ok that's a slight exaggeration but helium won't be a problem)

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "With the increase in gas production we are seeing we should be able to get more helium when we need it"

      There are only a few dozen wells in the USA with helium capturing facilities. Interestingly, a lot of wells in the middle east have been retrofitted with capturing equipment over the last decade.

  9. Alan Denman

    $550 HD price is no laughing matter

    Headline writer needed?

  10. Tromos

    The real question

    How many drives do you have to crack open to fill a party balloon?

  11. John 104

    @Tromos

    Best comment on el Reg I've read all week.

  12. Vlad

    Are these drives lighter?

    Has anyone weighed them to check that they ARE filled with Helium?

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