WD Announces 8TB, 10TB Helium Hard Drives 296
Lucas123 writes: Western Digital's HGST subsidiary today announced it's shipping its first 8TB and the world's first 10TB helium-filled hard drive. The 3.5-in, 10TB drive also marks HGST's first foray into the use of shingled magnetic recording technology, which Seagate began using last year. Unlike standard perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), where data tracks rest side by side, SMR overlaps the tracks on a platter like shingles on a roof, thereby allowing a higher areal density. Seagate has said SMR technology will allow it to achieve 20TB drives by 2020. That company has yet to use helium, however. HGST said its use of hermetically-sealed helium drives reduces friction among moving drive components and keeps dust out. Both drives use a 7-platter configuration with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. The company said it plans to discontinue its production of air-only drives by 2017, replacing all data center models with helium drives.
Helium? (Score:2)
I thought we were running out of Helium reserves?
Are there not other available inert gases that work as well?
Re:Helium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering a single balloon has more helium than $10,000 of these hard drives, I don't think this is going to be a serious issue anytime soon.
For party balloons, well, too bad.
Re:Helium? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there are not. In this case, low molecular weight is the key, and that nearly rules out anything except H2 and He.
H2 is too reactive though. Ne is interesting, but even more expensive the He and the only advantage is less leaking.
N2 is not meaningfully different from normal air, and Ar is even heavier.
CH4 is cheap, light, and mostly unreactive (at moderate temps) but it's really not light enough to compete with He.
And that's the end of the list.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
But helium filled disks will ensure an early end of life though. As there is basically nothing you can build that can contain it indefinetly..
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hot air works.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You have a weird definition of "easy".
Or are you talking about extracting it from natural gas wells?
Re: (Score:2)
Now if there was an easy way to get it out of all these stars....
Re: Helium? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Easy? Do you know how helium is produced? The helium we currently have access to is the result of Earth crust radioactive elements disintegration.
How do you think you gonna produce efficiently and in a cost effective manner He in volume? Tell us, I am very interested to start a business to produce it and I will give you half the shares for your effort.
Re: (Score:3)
Speak with the Qatarians:
"Air Liquide recently started up the world’s largest helium purification and liquefaction unit, a turnkey project at Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar. The new unit’s production capacity is approximately 38 million cubic meters of helium per year."
http://www.airliquide.com/en/q... [airliquide.com]
Do I get half the shares in your business?
Re: (Score:2)
How the hell does this address GP's point that all the helium produced comes from subterranean gas? Way to miss the point.
Re: (Score:3)
Uh, no. Helium is one of the most common byproducts of nuclear decay. We just call it 'alpha particles'.
Re: (Score:3)
Give me a break.
411 voted Yea, including 180 democrats.
Only 10 democrats voted Nae.
https://www.govtrack.us/congre... [govtrack.us]
This is the very definition of a bi-partisan bill. Your attempt to demonize the republican party and therefor cast your party, the democrats, as some kind of protector of the people is a joke. The democrats are just as corrupt as the republicans. And... this wasn't a bad bill anyway! The US government shouldn't have control over the entire supply of an Element!
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It has to do with the actual atom sizes, not the fact the gas is inert.
Their goal is for lower friction which Helium provides.
Now Hydrogen could be quite interesting as a replacement..... :D
Re:Helium? (Score:5, Informative)
I was also wondering this. Wouldn't nitrogen or argon/neon be cheaper?
The point of using helium is NOT that it is inert, but that it is low density (although the inertness is also nice). Neon is five times as dense and far more expensive. Methane is four times the density. The only gas lighter would be hydrogen. But hydrogen has a nasty habit of migrating through metal, leaking out, and embrittling the metal [wikipedia.org] in the process. Low density gases reduce friction both through reduced mass, and a higher speed threshold for laminar (rather than turbulent) flow. Low density gases tend to also be better heat conductors, helping to keep the disk cool. That is why high density gases, like xenon or sulfer hexafloride, are used in insulated windows.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe the lubrication would fail in vacuum?
Well, that would suck...
Re: (Score:2)
Like maybe all the alpha emitters ever created might produce enough helium in a billion years to fill a few party balloons?
Data Distortion (Score:4, Funny)
All my audio files sound like "Tiny Tim"
USA has it. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:USA has it. (Score:5, Insightful)
"One of the ultralight gases" - well, that narrows it down to H2 and He and nothing else, now, doesn't it? You left out that the candidate gas has to be very high in thermal conductivity as well, but both of those are so.
BTW, hydrogen is not higher density than helium. It is considerably lower. It would be more ideal than helium for this use if it weren't for its highly undesirable propensity to react with other substances.
We're not "running short" of helium. The ready supply of helium-rich natural gas is going to run out some time in the future, but so is the ready supply of just about everything else.
All the helium you could ever possibly want is in the atmosphere. 0.0005% by volume, or 0.00007% by mass, of the atmosphere is helium. The total mass of the atmosphere is 5x10^18 kg, so the total mass of the helium in the atmosphere is 3.5x10^12 kg. At STP (standard temperature and pressure), that represents 2x10^13 cubic meters.
That would fill 100 million Hindenburgs, or many trillion party balloons.
So no, even if/when the current sources of helium run out entirely, "all research into superconductivity" will NOT have to stop. It will "just" cost more.
The helium in the atmosphere is constantly escaping into space, and constantly being refreshed by escaping from the earth into the atmosphere. Inside the earth it is constantly being produced by nuclear processes.
Yes, it would be far more expensive to extract helium from the atmosphere at 0.0005% concentration than it is from natural gas sources at concentrations of from 0.1% to several %. But it is glaringly obvious that it is not impossible. The concentration of neon in the atmosphere is less than four times that of helium, and ALL the neon produced is produced by extracting it from the atmosphere.
containment (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The enterprise grade drives are designed to be refillable. Consumer grade will not be, but will have a several year MTBF by which time the drive will be obsolete anyway and you'll be able to get one 4X the size for the same price.
So not really an issue.
Re:containment (Score:5, Funny)
The enterprise grade drives are designed to be refillable. Consumer grade will not be, but will have a several year MTBF by which time the drive will be obsolete anyway and you'll be able to get one 4X the size for the same price.
So not really an issue.
Yeah, because I'm going to have keep a helium tank on hand to refill my drives / call a WD tech to do it for me with hs own supply of helium - "Go ahead and open up the drive bays in our secure data center and jam your nozzle into our running drives, you said you were coming between 8 AM and 5 PM, right?".
Re:containment (Score:5, Informative)
That's almost exactly how it works with our quarter million dollar SANs.
They get paid to maintain the SAN and regularly visit to swap hardware bits or apply software patches to it.
Re:containment (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just fill the whole data center with helium... that way, if any gets out of the drive, it's quickly refilled from the outside :-)
Yeah, that will work.... until the data center floats away.
Sorry boss, as much as I've tried to fight the fad, our data center is now in the cloud...
Re: (Score:2)
The enterprise grade drives are designed to be refillable.
I am very skeptical. TFA does not say anything about refillable drives. If there is a valve for refilling, then that valve itself will be a major point of failure for helium leaks. It is very difficult to design a valve that will let helium flow in, without the helium also leaking out.
Re:containment (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, sealing of the valve is a non-trivial issue, but it clearly can't possibly be an insuperable problem. Every K tank of compressed helium gas produced since the 1920s has such a valve, and those tanks are pressurized to well over 100 atmospheres. I have had such a tank sitting for over 10 years with negligible leakage as measured by gauge pressure. I did learn to my dismay that if you leave the main valve open and rely on the regulator and balloon-blowing attachment to hold, you will wonder where the gas went within weeks to months.
It would be interesting to know the pressure these drives operate at. If it is just room pressure, then I don't see how you could refill it unless you had an outgress valve as well as an ingress valve, in order to flush it.
Re: (Score:3)
It would be interesting to know the pressure these drives operate at. If it is just room pressure, then I don't see how you could refill it unless you had an outgress valve as well as an ingress valve, in order to flush it.
WD's website says the helium is "low pressure", whatever that means. But regardless of the pressure, when the helium leaks out, it will not be displaced by air. It will leave behind a vacuum. The helium will leak out, but nothing will leak in to replace it. It will stop leaking when the partial pressure equals the concentration of helium in the atmosphere, about 5.2 ppm.
Re: (Score:3)
obsolete?
if you use drives as shelf-spares or backups, then this is a MAJOR problem!
I have drives that are 10+ yrs old and while I don't spin them up very often, I do expect them to still work years from now as long as I give them a spin-up every so often, to keep them in shape.
a drive that fails just sitting there, unused, is NOT something I want to buy! or own.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with a party balloon and a hose?
Re: (Score:2)
It is probably refillable (or I hope it is). Like every year you get to refill your helium. Containment is always a problem with helium, usually solved by regular refilling.
Re: (Score:3)
Not a problem. The MTTF of a 10TB magnetic disk is probably around 10 minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
This takes "planned obsolescence" to a whole new level. "Your helium levels will reach critical in 32 days. Please replace your drive with a new one now."
I'd say this more takes IT cost justifications to a whole new level...
"Uh yeah hey boss, we're gonna need to buy $8K worth of replacement hard drives this month."
"Wait, what? We didn't budget for that! Why?!?"
"Well, I just got an alert, ours are leaking pretty bad. Low PSI warning. These things aren't SSD run-flats you know."
I mean c'mon...that would peg the bullshit meter of even the PHB.
Re:containment (Score:5, Informative)
Clever materials choices and lower pressure than on the outside (~40% IIRC). Luckily leakage is easily measured in the product design and testing phase, as well as ongoing QA. So not nearly as much risk to your data as stupid firmware bugs that only turn up under some circumstances after lots of usage. And no, they won't be refillable.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, not so much for permeation, maybe, but they still quote this as one of the things that help. Could maybe do some for actual leaks - but getting air in would be sad too. The big reason for lower pressure is the lower resistance though - I like paying less in power&cooling thanks to lower power use to keep the platters spinning.
Re:containment (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Simple question: 10-15 years from now, after the helium has escaped, will this thing still work? Today you can take a HD built 10-15 years ago, and there is a good chance it will still work (assuming you have the right cables, drivers, etc.).
Re: (Score:2)
well of course they did! (Score:5, Funny)
I ordered 6TB drives 3 hours ago...
Re: well of course they did! (Score:2)
Not with amazon you can't
Preparing for shipping as soon as you order and it wont ship for another day
Re: (Score:2)
That generalization is highly questionable. I have had a population of over twenty Toshiba 3 TB, including 12 spinning 24x7 that have from 6-14 months of power-on-time. Zero in-service failures.
Only one problem... (Score:5, Funny)
Now all my MP3s sound like the Chipmunks!
Leakage? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I bought a 2TB drive not long after they came out, had it in a RAID setup, and both drives crashed 3 days after I installed them.
I mean I bought (2) 2 TB drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I still have a couple of Bigfoot drives running strong in a Windows 98 machine. Most reliable drives I've ever had. Slow, yes, but for my application, fast enough.
What about heat-assisted magnetic recording? (Score:3)
When these drives were first announced it was speculated that they would use heat-assisted magnetic recording [wikipedia.org], which could store a bit into a single magnetic grain rather than a domain consisting of hundreds of them. But it turned out that they used shingled magnetic recording instead, which seems to have less long-term promise. What's the news on HAMR? Is it still being pursued?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I tried using HAMR, but my drive is just in pieces now.
Re:What about heat-assisted magnetic recording? (Score:5, Funny)
What's the news on HAMR? Is it still being pursued?
Don't stop. It's not HAMR time.
SSDs will outpace platter drives (Score:4, Interesting)
By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.
We are seeing the buggy whip manufacturers in full denial. 10TB drives should have been out a year ago, and consumer 6TB drives should be selling for under $100. The floods in Thailand gave platter drive makers an excuse to keep the prices (and profits) jacked up artificially while the insurance money replaced aging plants with the latest technology.
With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.
Re: (Score:3)
> By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.
I will believe it when I see it.
Even with spinning rust you see a lot of vaporware and delay.
Gleeful declarations of the death of the other option are entirely premature.
> and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability
That's the real kicker. I can bitch and moan about my Barracudas all I want but at least they give me ample warning before giving up the ghost. SSD has yet to prove itself in this regard.
Re: (Score:2)
I have some relatively ancient OCZ Vertex drives that are still running, 24/7 as OS drives for two of my servers (media and an ESXi box). Meanwhile, I have a large stack of platter drives that gave up the ghost with no warning whatsoever.
Reliability is as much a quality issue with SSDs as they are with platter drives, but there is less tolerance, more failure points with a platter drive, due to mechanical action.
Re:SSDs will outpace platter drives (Score:5, Interesting)
With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.
It's not so much a trend as it is an unavoidable problem with increasing densities of SSDs. As you shrink the process size to fit more stuff in the same space, the durability goes down. As you change from SLC to MLC to TLC to fit more stuff in the same space, durability goes down. Substantial technological advances will be required to produce a 20T SSD with both acceptable durability and cost.
In comparison, shortscreen monitors (often mislabeled as widescreen) are a trend which has no logical or technical underpinning.
Re:SSDs will outpace platter drives (Score:4, Insightful)
With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.
It's not so much a trend as it is an unavoidable problem with increasing densities of SSDs. As you shrink the process size to fit more stuff in the same space, the durability goes down. As you change from SLC to MLC to TLC to fit more stuff in the same space, durability goes down. Substantial technological advances will be required to produce a 20T SSD with both acceptable durability and cost.
In comparison, shortscreen monitors (often mislabeled as widescreen) are a trend which has no logical or technical underpinning.
You could easily get 20 TB of flash today if you used a full size drive enclosure instead of the 2.5" wide, 7mm high shit they put out today.
I've got plenty of 5.25" drive bays. Give me a 5.25" SSD with a HDL, SATA Express/NME, or PCI-e 3.0 (x4 at least) connection. Then give me a chipset that lets me RAID across PCI-e storage devices, making sure I can boot off the resulting array and pass TRIM to the drives behind it.
Or how about someone starts making RAM drives (for a decent price!) again?
Re: (Score:2)
Or how about someone starts making RAM drives (for a decent price!) again?
It's easier to just buy more system RAM than to have specialized "RAM drive" hardware.
Then, if caching doesn't give you good enough performance, you can just use software to create a RAM disk.
Re: (Score:3)
But I want to BOOT off of it and have everything on one drive/partition. This isn't 1992, I don't enjoy juggling partitions for no fucking reason.
I want battery-backed, NAND-backed, RAM speeds. Blitz it all into the drive's RAM at POST. Then the OS doesn't even have to know WTF is going on.
At shutdown or loss of power, dump it all back to NAND.
You could probably even extend the life of that NAND dramatically by ONLY writing to it when power has been cut. So even when you've shutdown/halted, you're pulli
Re: (Score:3)
SSDs have far more room for innovation than platter drive technology. There are lots of promising advances making their way to production. Even better... you don't have to shrink the chips and make them more dense - you just have to make the existing fab cheaper. In 6 years, those chips will cost a fraction of what they do today.
As for monitors, 1080p is the result of convergence between the television and the computer monitor. Like it or not, it has resulted in an unprecedented reduction in price. South Ko
Re: (Score:2)
There's still a >10:1 cost difference between 4TB HDDs and 1TB SSDs and SSD prices are not dropping that fast. Current SSDs are already on the bleeding edge of processing technology with 16nm MLC so there's fairly limited density increases and big durability issues ahead. I guess the wildcard is 3D NAND, but much like going multicore for CPUs it's a substitute. However, they are taking over all normal end user uses in cell phones and tables and laptops, it's just the big bulk storage left.
Re: (Score:3)
I've been watching storage price trends for the past five years.
Cost per 10TB of storage:
SSD progress has been amazing. The price for SSD storage is now 10x that of platters, compared to 37.5x in 2009. The cost for a platter drive today per TB is 50% of what it was five years ago, but for an SSD it is only 13%! Does it look like SSDs are about to take over
Re: (Score:2)
Why should we be excited by a $30 1TGB drive today? 5 years ago I was paying $50 for 2TB drives.
That's my point. Development has slowed on higher capacity platter drives for a number of reasons... our demand as consumers might have slowed, but the "cloud" continues to grow and demand storage, but cloud providers are willing to spend too much for enterprise-grade storage they need. Technology is certainly a stumbling block, but they've been talking about these advances for many years. The main reason for the
Just wondering... (Score:2)
Ain't Helium leakage only an issue under positive atmospheric pressure?
If the keep the Helium slight under normal atmospheric pressure it should stay inside the drive.
As long as the seal around it is good enough to keep other larger molecules out, the Helium will sit happily inside the drive..
Or am i missing something? never paid attention to those bits of science classes when i was younger...
Re: (Score:2)
You're missing the part where He is an inert monatomic gas -- since any pressure is created by how much helium you've got in that otherwise-vacuum, you'll find that the helium atoms, which can pretty much go anywhere they'll fit, will eventually find their way through the mass of other atoms bit by bit. They're small enough that they'll drift right through any "air pressure" as they can comfortably fit between most other gas molecules no matter how tightly they're packed together.
So it really all comes dow
Re: (Score:2)
So it really all comes down to the seal: if they can get the seal to leave a gap no greater than two protons thick (He comes in stable isotopes of 1 or 2 neutrons), then no helium can escape. Good luck getting a seal that good though.
Well, you just need to squeeze your neutronium together really hard along the joints.
Seriously, "a gap no greater than two protons thick"? Have you completely forgotten about electrons? You know, those things that hold all Earthly matter together (and apart)?
Helium eh? (Score:2)
When approached for a comment, Dejah Thoris [wikipedia.org] would only say "How have I come to be on Jasoom? And where is John Carter?".
Neato (Score:2)
why not build it stronger (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't work: The read/write heads are actually floating a microscopic distance above the platter on cushion of air/helium/whatever. Without the gas, the distance between the heads and the platter would vary wildly, and it would almost immediately and literally come to a grinding halt, scratching up the disk surface in the process.
More importantly: Get Perpendicular follow-up! (Score:2)
Certainly we need an update to this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II
Do not want (Score:2)
So with the slow yet inevitable leakage of helium, what will be the estimated lifetime of these drives?
Planned obsolescence, anyone?
Deja vu all over again (Score:2)
This has a familiar ring about it. We discussed this same story two years ago.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Not the first helium fillled drive (Score:5, Interesting)
In the late 1960s, DDC of San Diego made head-per-track disk drives that operated with a helium atmosphere. These units had a cylinder of helium fastened to the baseplate (the units were 19" rack mount), and the documentation included procedures for replacing the cylinder and for purging from a full-sized cylinder if it was ever necessary to open the unit for repairs.
I had driven down to San Diego circa 1978 to buy a cylinder of refill helium from DDC for one of these in a hand-me-down system, but never got around to replacing the cylinder on the drive. The cylinder sat in my garage for years. Thirty years later I was a returned adult physics student. My professor was using a similar helium cylinder to purge a cryostat for a superconducting magnet. He ran out of helium, and the department had no other helium. I told him "wait 20 minutes, I'll be back." I retrieved the cylinder from my garage, and the professor was both delighted and baffled. When connected to the regulator, the cylinder proved to have maintained a remarkable fraction of its original pressure, and the professor was able to complete his procedure. Sadly, another part of the magnet failed and suffered a gas pressure explosion as it was being cooled.
In a remarkable coincidence, I noted that the department's helium cylinder and mine were identical, all the way down to a part number stenciled on them.
Lighter Laptop (Score:2)
Aluminum leaks Helium. (Score:2)
Instead of an all-out pissing contest, can we have *reliable* 1 TB drives? Every drive bigger than 500GB has developped problems here a couple months past their warranty. Besides, Helium leaks unless properly sealed.
Crossfire Hurricane (Score:2, Funny)
Who needs Terabyte Flash
When you spin rust in gas?
Re:Crossfire Hurricane (Score:5, Funny)
BURMA SHAVE
Myanmar much? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When can we stop selling party balloons (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because congress decided we needed to get rid ot all our heilum supplies quick and dump it for cheap?
The amount of helium used in these drives is utterly insignificant. Congress liquidated the helium reserves on the assumption that the market would respond to shortages more effectively than bureaucrats. So far they have been right. Many gas wells that produce helium have be idled, both because of the low price of gas and the low price of helium. So plenty of helium is being "reserved" by leaving it in the ground. If you think you are smarter than the market, feel free to start your own stockpile. When you get rich, you can come back here, post a picture of your yacht, and say "See, I told you so!"
Re: (Score:3)
Yes I guess that is why a gas we can only mine tiny quantities of from natural gas reserves is currently being sold off for party balloon use.
Helium is being sold off at any bid price on the assumption that the stockpile is unlimited and needs to be liquidated. It's not being priced according to the long-term cost or capability of supplying the volumes that are being drawn from the stockpile on a sustainable basis, which is what you'd actually do if you were running a business dealing in actual production.
Re:When can we stop selling party balloons (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not being priced according to the long-term cost or capability of supplying the volumes that are being drawn from the stockpile on a sustainable basis, which is what you'd actually do if you were running a business dealing in actual production.
Yes, clearly all the people investing THEIR OWN MONEY are complete idiots, and you, a random guy on the internet, are so much smarter than actual investors and professional geologists. So does this mean you are going to invest all your money in helium futures, that are obviously going to be worth billions when the helium runs out, just like all the arm chair doomsayers are predicting?
Re: (Score:3)
Is that different from weapons-grade helium?
Re: (Score:3)
Part balloon helium raises your voice.
A weapons grade helium bomb raises the voices of everyone in a five mile area to the point that it's above the human hearing range, thus disabling the enemy's communications.
Obviously, we need to watch out for potential terrorists in the form of people holding balloons.
Don't even get me started on the weapons-grade ice cream and the disabling headaches is causes.
Re:When can we stop selling party balloons (Score:5, Interesting)
Helium balloons are a minor part of the overall picture. The overwhelming majority of uses are industrial, such as cryogenics. The problem is that they don't recover it. If you want to make a big impact on the helium consumption rate, hard drives is pretty much one of the least effective places you could focus - focus on industrial recovery.
Note that humans will never "run out" of helium. Even if we assume that space-based resource extraction becomes realistic, one can always refrigerate it out of the atmosphere. Or more accurately, refrigerate everything else out and leave the helium behind. There's only a tiny bit in the atmosphere, but for important uses it'll remain a possibility. I saw page that says that neon is $2 per liter. If you're refrigerating neon out of the atmosphere, pretty much all that's left is helium, so you're co-producing it, at a ratio of 3.5 to 1. If we assume that helium demand vastly outpaces neon demand, then the helium cost would be $7 per liter. And maybe less in mass production.
That's not really an absurd price for many uses - such as hard drives. On the other hand, it's dramatically more than today's prices at about $0.005 per liter! You're not going to be making helium blimps at $7 per liter. But if industry learns how to recapture and reuse, they should manage.
(Of course, humans probably wouldn't have to resort to helium extraction from the atmosphere for centuries, pretty much any gas coming out of the ground will be richer in helium than the air)
Re: (Score:3)
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
So how does that work?
Re:When can we stop selling party balloons (Score:5, Informative)
So how does that work?
The helium in the atmosphere slowly dissipates into space. But it is also replenished by helium leaking out of the ground, where it is generated by radioactive elements emitting alpha particles (which are helium nuclei). At about 5.5 ppm, the source and drain are in equilibrium.
Re: (Score:3)
You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.
According to this [wikipedia.org] (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. [wolframalpha.com] The National Helium Reserve [wikipedia.org] is 1e9 m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Government created the reserve. Government paid for the refining of He from natural gas in Texas, Oaklahoma and Louisiana.
Government found the program was 1.2 billion in debt.
Government handed the business to Private Enterprise
Private enterprise sold the product dirt cheap (they didn't inherit the outstanding debt, yet another Pro-Capitalist giveaway).
and now, somehow, it is Congress fault?
Re: (Score:2)
They no longer provide MBTF metrics for consumer (Deskstar) class drives but the uncorrectable error rate on Ultrastars is an order of magnitude higher than the others, which is a common distinction between consumer and enterprise-grade drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any idea how expensive RAM is? It's a couple factors larger than even NAND storage in price. If you want $20,000 hard drives your idea sounds great but the fact is RAM Is far too expensive. NAND and it's possible future replacements for non-volatile storage are the future. Spinning rust long term isn't going to be viable.
10TB of RAM? (Score:2)
You seem to have a really... optimistic view of the size, cost, and power budget for RAM.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it's a typo. It should say shingled (like shingles on a roof there is overlap).
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, I'm thinking the same thing. 5 years down the road those drives won't work. I'd rather have reliable drives than a dick contest...