Discussion on:

Helium-filled drives will lift capacities to new heights

Enclosed Server Rooms with bad Helium Drives that are about to die, anyone else feel a little lightheaded? Also why is our voices so much higher? I can't wait to install these drives.

With a sealed drive how can it run cooler than a drive constantly having gas changed?

With conventional Heating/cooling you constantly recycle the air to provide more heat or cooling as once cooled/heated air being sucked in and cooled/heated again picks up more chilling or heating. If you constantly suck in fresh air and blow out used air you don't have as efficient heating/cooling as the temperature change is limited to the amount of time that the Air is in contact with the Heating/cooling elements.

With Helium Filled Drives that are sealed the Helium must eventually suck up more of the produced heat and in no way acts to cool the drive. With the increases in Heat that must come with any sealed drive the internal pressure Increases and places more load on the seals sealing the drive which must eventually cause the seals to fail sooner rather than latter and hence the drive fail more often than a drive that holds no internal pressure.

Of course I could be entirely missing the point and they are planning on having large external Helium Reserves and Radiators to cool the drives but that seems much more complicated not to mention Expensive than the current way of keeping the heads away from the platters. Not to mention much more expensive to power which would be a major disadvantage for any Cloud Provider and immediately rule them out for the medium to bigger Cloud Providers.

Yes they currently have a problem and Helium may even solve it for the time being but I just don't buy the spin as things currently stand. Reminds me of the Old Hydraulic Drives we used to have back in the Main Frame Days which where great till they developed a Leak, you then had drive enclosures full of Hydraulic Fluid leaking on the floor or worse still, if you had the covers off the enclosure and made the mistake of running the drive even for a second or two you had a even bigger mess to clean up.

Col

You certainly have not gotten any Less Annoying. Cheers.

OK, HAL. Anyway.

The known benefits of using helium are not new, what Hitachi fiured out is how to keep the darn helium in the drives.

The efficiencies introduced by using helium reduce power consumption significantly per drive, even more so per terabyte, so less waste heat to transfer.. Helium has roughly 4-5 times the thermal conductivity of air, so better heat transfer.

Now, there are various things to consider here in practice, so if they published actual verified numbers, it would help. Then you wouldn't have to wonder about spin (which was a Very Good Pun, by the way). Humidity, I assume, is a controlled quantity in enterprise situations. TC varies with the temperature of the conductor. There is, as you note, a difference in the type of heat transfer (moving coolant vs. straight conduction). So there should be data plotted on curves for the normal operating temperature range and such. It wouldn't be a new thing for someone to build a worse product out of superior materials.

I think I covered, more or less, what I posted last time.

And here is the original PR:
hgst.theobviousTLD whack press-room/2012/hgst-announces-radically-new-helium-filled-hard-disk-drive-platform

While the concept is commendable i also share your concern about the helium part! You can't just store the heat in the drives there must be a way to transfer it out of the "Hermetically sealed enclosure" else we might be having cases of exploding HD in the data centers!

The good side is that we are assured (assuming that there is another explanation of how this is supposed to work) of having larger capacity drives to temporarily satisfy our insatiable need for larger, faster, cooler and tinier drives. Fantastic though that they are pushing the envelope on this.

Regards

When the helium leaks out, as it will, the drive will be very useless.
Am i right?

The technology / Science is great, but why did they choose Helium? Don't they read their science magazines, or nobody told them? Helium is the one gas we don't have left in abundance, and is likely to run out in the short term. Surely one of the other inert gases would have been a better choice. It's bad enough that we will be wasting great amounts this holiday season with people consuming it from balloons at xmas parties, now they want to put extra pressure on the resources by filling the milliards of hard drives with it. I suppose that will also push the price up as the gas gets more rare.
SB

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There's already talk about restricting the use of Helium in the US for medical use only since it is in short supply, can't be created, and it's needed in the medical field.

Errrrr......Have we forgotten about Solid State Drives and the progress they are making.
Mechanical is old technology whatever gas you stick in them.

Science fiction, containing Helium is extremely difficult, this will never make it in light of the SDD technology.

At least so far. Anyone remember back in the late 1980s? Someone said color laptops will never happen and he was taken seriously. Even I knew that was a pantload.

As for SSDs, yes, they will eventually replace platters but as far as I know, they haven't exceeded 1TB with those yet (let alone 4TB) and they are still more expensive. They will get there eventually.

Then there is the helium shortage. Also, helium will leak out. I used to work on systems that used helium in cryogenic applications and we used a helium leak detector to make sure the connectors were tight enough to limit the leaks as much as possible.

Just how often do you have to refill the containment with Helium? Spent over 20 years working with helium and containing it is quite a problem. Unless the containment has been leak checked to 10 to the -10 it is just going to be a slow helium leak. Even at the high level of testing, helium permeates through many materials. Good Luck with this one!

Helium (HE) is limited, not easy to manufacture.
Today is is mined (if you can believe that) out of the ground.
The current HE mines are drying? up which is driving the cost of HE up.
Most Helium balloons are mostly Nitrogen+Helium, enough HE to make the balloon float.

The best way to make Helium is by combining two Hydrogen atoms (H+H).
It is called Fusion and also release lots of energy. Maybe the excess energy from the Helium factory can be used to power the world.

Also, He is very small, it will "leak" out no matter how secure and tight the harddrive is. The good news is nothing will replace the He since nothing can leak IN.

As for temperature, He will not help, it is surface area and the speed at which you can radiate heat off that will determine the inside temperature. "Simple" but hard to solve mechanical problem.

Yes, HE supply is dwindling fast. Once we run out, then what? Though one can argue that very little is needed for the drives, but as demand for the new HE-filled drives, the supply will end. I recommend that the industry use a renewable gas instead.

That very well may be correct, but I find it hard to believe that we have a) exhausted the entire supply on our planet (yes - it may be more expensive to find more, but need finds a way) and my guess is that there are other gases that would do almost as well that are available to try. The air we breathe is not clean (even when filtered) and cleaning it better would also help. I understand that it is heavier than helium. Why not Hydrogen? It is even lighter and pretty plentiful. In a closed environment, it is not a fire hazard unless it gets too hot and we know how to lower the temperature sufficiently - we already do it for our CPUs and a closed circuit water cooling system is not that expensive and with more use will be even less expensive.

Well, I suppose. But only because we're not tapping our natural gas deposits, which are 7% helium.