back to article Helium-filled drive tech floats to top of HGST heap

HGST has announced second-generation helium drive tech after shipping a million gen-1 Helium drives and upping field reliability by 15 per cent. These drives have enclosures filled with helium instead of air. This is only 14 per cent of the density of air, so platters spin with less friction, vibrating less and needing less …

  1. Mine's a pint

    Low flying heads

    Interesting to see how the heads fly above the platters in vacuum ( filled? emptied?) drives. Electrostatic charges perhaps?

    1. handle

      Re: Low flying heads

      Not sure quite what you're asking, but HDs must have gas in to make the heads fly, and if you wanted to make an evacuated one you'd need an enormously strong container, negating any advantages.

    2. samlebon2306

      Re: Low flying heads

      Nothing flies in a vacuum.

  2. Yugguy

    Yeah helium, great

    Cos we've got loads of that.

    Er, wait...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Yeah helium, great

      We surely don't want to run out of helium but you might want to check your target: wild-ass-guess says one helium party balloon has the same He gas content as 100+ drives (since most of interior volume is platters, heads, etc), and the average wedding party around here seems to release a couple of dozen balloons, symbolising aspirations or somesuch. So that's a few thousand drives worth, each of which will probably be longer-lived than the average marriage ;-)

      Maybe Tim Worstall will drop in and tell us what the real He reserves & resources are like.

      1. handle

        Re: Yeah helium, great

        How much helium does balloon gas contain though? Just enough to make a balloon buoyant at the pressure required to inflate it may not be very much.

        1. Nigel 11

          Re: Yeah helium, great

          So maybe a few hundred drives' worth per wedding rather than a few thousand. Same point.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Yeah helium, great

          Foil coated balloons (specifically made for helium filling and so far less pervious than standard rubber ones) steadily lose both buoyancy and volume across several weeks before entering an apparently endless half-sized afterlife (observations terminated after some months when child finally persuaded that balloon had joined choir invisible). Interestingly the foil is only a little elastic at the outset and rapidly becomes flaccidso most of the helium loss occurs at atmospheric pressure rather than being "squeezed out" by the taut rubber membrane. So from this I guess that the contents is roughly half He and half dull (air? nitrogen), i.e. indeed only half a metric crapton of new-fangled HDD per wedding.

    2. Duffy Moon

      Re: Yeah helium, great

      Perhaps HGST could operate a helium recovery service...

  3. CAPS LOCK

    Anyone here in a position to comment on the reliablity?

    My spider senses are tingling....

  4. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    "before those persistent helium molecules find a way through"

    I grant that having a medium to 'fly' the heads is important, but surely the major problem is not preventing the helium getting out, but preventing other atmospheric gasses getting in.

    Because nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide are much larger molecules, it's much easier to prevent them entering the drive.

    Provided you can prevent other gasses entering, the rate of helium leakage will fall anyway, as the pressure inside the drive drops, so I can see them having a quite long life.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: "before those persistent helium molecules find a way through"

      Helium molecules are actually atoms. They are the smallest thing floating around out there. They ooze out through thin layers with relative ease. I'd imagine the pores in metal are pretty good at stopping it though.

      Why the hell we waste He in weather balloons is beyond me - having spent time deliberately filling things with H2 and setting them off its bloody hard to hurt yourself doing it. Well unless you get some 02 and mix that in as well. That makes your ears ring for days!

      1. TeeCee Gold badge

        Re: "before those persistent helium molecules find a way through"

        I'm guessing that the reason there is not what happens to the balloon itself, but because driving to where you want to launch the thing with a tank of pressurised Hydrogen in your vehicle has a whole can of worms around permits, vehicle labelling, where you can and cannot go and such associated with it.

  5. Tom 38

    The article mentions that He10 is an SMR drive, but it doesn't explain what that means. SMR, particularly device managed devices like the He10, are not at all comparable to regular spinning disks.

    Device managed SMR drives are only really suitable for write once/read many archival workloads, because of the massive expensive (performance) cost of the shingling on writes combined with the non-aware access of the device - the OS will treat it like any other type of drive - and you will get atrocious performance.

    This review includes a comparison of rebuilding a RAID array comprised of 8TB Seagate SMR drives, compared to HGST He8 drives, which are PMR. The rebuild took 57 hours on the SMR, compared to 20 hours for the PMR drives. Average read/write speeds during the rebuild were both around 155MB/s on the PMR array and <10MB/s on the SMR array.

    Host managed SMR drives (which are not out yet) will allow the OS to understand the performance characteristics of the drive, and use it in a totally different way to a PMR drive. Until then, they are really only useful in a single disk archive.

    1. Jim O'Reilly

      Do spinning drives have any other use than archiving?

      It really doesn't matter that shingled drives are only good for archiving. That's the role of all spinning drives in the future, as solid-state gets cheap and very dense.

      Intel and others are predicting equal capacities next year, and price parity in 2017. when this happens, the spinners are doomed!

  6. PleebSmash
    FAIL

    Chris plz

    or, fantasy maybe, leapfrog over it and go instead for vacuum drives with zero platter atmosphere friction.

    Activate the warp drive, we're leaving this planet.

  7. Daedalus
    Boffin

    He is single

    "Helium molecules" ? Ain't no such animal. Like all the noble gases, helium in its normal state exists as isolated atoms, both lighter and smaller in size than the molecules of gases such as oxygen or nitrogen. That's why helium leaks out so well, since the atoms can get through the tiniest of pores.

    I'm surprised the manufacturers didn't give Neon a shot. Cheaper all around and similar properties.

    1. jabuzz

      Re: He is single

      Neon is much much more expensive than Helium. So while Neon does not when released into the atmosphere escape into outer space as Helium does, and thus not be lost to humanity, it is more expensive. That said it probably costs a few pennies for the amount required to fill a drive.

      1. Daedalus

        Re: He is single

        That's hard to believe, considering we've used it in neon signs for decades. It's easier to isolate than helium because it liquefies more easily.

    2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

      Sure about that?

      Helium can be forced to form a few compounds, including He2. In real life, I doubt you would find any in a hard disk.

  8. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    He 6 ?

    Woah.... That will radioactively decompose with enough energy to power a small supernova in a couple of femtoseconds. Not something I would like as a name for my product...

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Extra spicey vindaloo

    So..

    The helium escapes, as helium does.

    The gas in the drive becomes less and less dense, and less and less conductive to heat.

    I'm not convinced filling a drive with He is a good idea(tm)

    1. FartingHippo
      Boffin

      Re: So..

      It doesn't leave a vacuum behind!

      It will only continue to escape if there's a pressure differential. So leaking helium is either replaced by air or (maybe more likely) outgassing from internal components. That would leave a denser, more frictiony gas which may still cause problems as the whole set up is dependent on working in a low friction environmnet.

      And 'frictiony' is so a word.

      1. PNGuinn
        Go

        "Frictiony"

        It is NOW!

        Congratulations - you have just addad another turd to the cesspool of language.

        I bags "frictionicity" " frictionability" and for all you Septics out there (the NSA and GCHQ know who / where you are) - "to frictionate".

      2. Jan 0 Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: So..

        It so does leave a vacuum* behind!

        A sealed, air filled, hard disc drive will always have approximately the same pressure as the ambient air because the rate of inward diffusion matches the outward rate.

        In the case of a sealed, helium filled, drive there is almost no helium outside, but the helium atoms inside will move at a velocity determined by the ambient temperature and their random walks will lead some helium atoms outside. (See: Kinetic Theory of Gases). Far more Helium atoms will move out, than air molecules move in, because the air molecules are larger and are less likely to 'find' paths through the seal. I wouldn't expect a spectacular drop in pressure in 5 years, but I bet you could measure it with an unsophisticated manometer.

        *partial vacuum - to be precise. It's never going to reach a high vacuum!

        Mine's the one with the 'diffusion pump' in the long pocket.

  11. Haku

    Helium inside and nobody made a turbo boost joke yet?

    /disappointed Knight Rider fan

    1. FartingHippo

      Re: Helium inside and nobody made a turbo boost joke yet?

      Now that's a joke which will be understood by a vanishingly small section of society. +1

      1. Haku

        Re: Helium inside and nobody made a turbo boost joke yet?

        So I should only make jokes that the majority of society will get?

        That's not a world I would like to inhabit.

  12. ehoffman

    I guess you cloud also mention that the drives will be lighter :-) Put more helium and we'll have floating drives... Look Ma, cloud storage...!

    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      Coat

      you cloud also mention

      You work for HP and ICMFP.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    false promises

    "They are warranted for 5 years, so you're certainly safe over that period" - not so. Warranties work on the basis that only a statistically small number (not zero) of devices fail within the specified period. Uncertainty assures that yours might be one of them.

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