Western Digital Announces World's First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive (techgage.com) 145
Deathspawner writes: Western Digital today announced a new, helium-filled enterprise HDD that allows for 10TB capacities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). WD's latest enterprise drive, sold as the HGST Ultrastar He10, uses the PMR storage method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive.
Just one problem: (Score:5, Funny)
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Seems legit (Score:5, Funny)
Tethering yourself to a bunch of helium-filled drives is a great way to get into the cloud.
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It makes for racks of drives very easy to move from one side of a data center to the other.
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Tethering yourself to a bunch of helium-filled...
A real man uses hydrogen - none of this sissy helium stuff.
Great until we run out of Helium (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great until we run out of Helium (Score:5, Informative)
Purifying helium is not hard: everything else condenses out way before it does. You just blow "dirty" helium over a sufficiently cold heat exchanger, and everything other than helium will condense on the heat exchanger. See e.g. this excellent reference [arxiv.org].
Re:Great until we run out of Helium (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great until we run out of Helium (Score:4, Informative)
Stop promoting this myth.
From http://geology.com/articles/helium/
Some natural gas fields have enough helium mingled with the gas that it can be extracted at an economical cost. A few fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume. Companies that drill for natural gas in these areas produce the natural gas, process it and remove the helium as a byproduct
And by 'byproduct' they mean blow it to the wind without a second thought. That's 7% helium by volume, just dumped as we type. Do you think the world's party balloons (or fractional amounts in hds) even come close to this volume?
More fracking means less He (Score:3)
The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies -- which is not something you refuted. You quoted something about known supplies. It could well be that the GP's claim is true. Most of our *new* natural gas supplies are from fracking, which results in very little helium [bloomberg.com].
Moreover, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. You note that, "*A few* fields in the United States contain over 7% helium by volume," and then make the unsubstantiated claim that none of
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The GP didn't say that we're running out of He; the GP said that we are not finding *new* supplies
The title of his post (which you changed) said exactly that.
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Fair enough. Cut off the first sentence of my post if you'd like; the rest still stands.
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"Helium is needed for scientific research and medical diagnostic equipment."
Whoever pays the most will always be able to get what they want. Getting helium for scientific and medical purposes more than likely gets priority too. I wouldn't be worried about hard drives 'wasting' helium. Mechanical hard drives are on their way out anyway. The only thing going for them is their massive amount of storage space and the only reason SSDs haven't caught up is because the SSD manufacturers would rather milk the marke
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The market will provide. My understanding is that the US government is selling off its helium reserve which lowers prices and makes it uneconomical to extract a lot of it at the moment. When the reserve is depleted and prices raise back up to natural levels then collection will increase.
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A high enough price will drive hydrogen atoms to fuse, resulting in helium. In this case, neo-classical microeconomics overrides the standard model of physics.
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To produce a useful amount of helium by this method would require fusing sufficient hydrogen to literally boil
the oceans of the world.
The problem with helium is that once it is vented into the atmosphere it is unrecoverably lost to outer space.
At least filling hard drives with the stuff is accomplishing something useful. I contrast this with a party balloon that could just as easily be filled with hydrogen gas, and would just make a slightly louder bang when popped as a result.
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The problem is that the market doesn't give a fuck if helium is as cheap as air or $10m for a tiny glass vial full of it that sits in a billionaire's curio cabinet. Either counts as the market "providing," and the latter scenario could occur if sources are sufficiently scarce - which, again, the market can do nothing about. The reserve selloff could actually lead to even more wasteful behavior like the natural gas industry venting helium as mentioned further up the page.
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There is no scarcity of helium in the first place, and, just like any other commodity, the market will seek a price where supply meets demand. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices. If helium becomes valuable to produce because the demand grows, the the natural gas fields which today just release all that useless helium will start capturing it and producing 2 products.
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None of that says that it's scarce, or that we could possibly run out before it becomes trivial to get more, or that Helium used in production is a non-trivial contributor to total Helium loss. Hand-wavey doomsday arguments just aren't that interesting.
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So here's how it works.
Disaster is predicted. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and take steps to avoid the disaster. In this case, that would probably involve writing legislation around wasting helium during natural gas extraction - in other words, pushing back against the market's tendency to ignore problems until it's too late - or something similar.
As a result of these actions, disaster is averted. A consequence of this type of thing generally working much of the time, i
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So here's how it works.
Someone poorly versed in science invents a disaster scenario. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and dismiss the argument as no solid evidence was presented, and speculation isn't the thing they're interested in, so they stop paying attention. Some politician sees the opportunity, and writes legislation that, what a coincidence, happens to benefit some of his donors while mandating that people give up just a little to avert this alleged disaster.
As a
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2) Use in hard-drives specifically isn't relevant. It's probably a waste, given that there are better technologies, but I don't think many of these particular drives are likely to be sold. I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out
3) Thanks
I've got no idea about low-flow toilets, except that it sounds a bit gross, and American toilets are wei
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There's a need to conserve helium because it's non-renewable.
That's not important. Everything is non-renewable on some scale. Solar power is not renewable on some scale. Fusion is non-renewable on some scale. That's not the question I asked. You answered the question you liked, instead of the question I asked. Did you think I wouldn't notice?
I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out
So, for any specific thing you want to address, you still need to demonstrate that that specific thing is worthwhile. If helium becomes scare, the price will rice, and people will use less. Until you prove (1), I'm free
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But the already-released helium will never be recovered (and will probably have escaped Earth's atmosphere).
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How are the natural gas fields of today going to capture helium in the future.
Oh, you're making the assumption that the field producing today (and allegedly venting helium into the atmosphere) are still going to be producing in 5, 10, 20 whenever years when you think the helium price will rise. Some of them may be. And
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The market reflects the best efforts of people with a great deal of money on the line to predict the future. When it looks like a real shortage is on the horizon, you see stuff like people buying vast amounts of oil, loading it into tankers, and storing the oil to be sold into the predicted crunch. The wisdom of crowds is never perfect, but it can be OK.
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Those "others" could make billions if they were actually better than guessing. But there are no such experts. Lots of "peak oil" predictors though, and Malthus never seems to rest.
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... makes it uneconomical to capture, you mean? Extraction happens as a byproduct of extracting the natural gas, as far as I'm aware; it's just a question of whether it's captured or thrown away.
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We keep finding new uses for Helium, but not new supplies.
Precisely!!! Just stick to getting SSDs into that price range, so that helium won't be needed
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Here's the problem right now. Storage. We don't need spinning drives to store stuff, but we continue to use them because they are still cheaper than the alternative. The limitations of spinning drives is now starting to really impact access to data on those drives. There is too much data on these slow devices and that is the problem.
My prediction is, that in less than 3 years, you'll see the final death blow to Spinning disks (though they will remain like Floppies forever for legacy reasons) as they are fin
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We don't? I don't know about you, but I'm not gung-ho enough to entrust my storage to SSDs just yet. Yes, you should have back-ups, but recovering from them isn't IMO amusing enough to switch out hard drives which until further notice not only continues to be cheaper per data unit, but also continues to be a damned sight more predictable and reliable. Maybe that will change some day, but that day ain't today, sunshine.
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Maybe we could farm Helium from WD HGST drives?
I guess that's like having George Lucas fix Star Wars Ep. I-III, sort of ridiculous.
Helium (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't helium leak out of things shockingly quickly? What's the expected lifetime of the helium within the drive, and when will it stop operating with... whatever helium adds to the equation, here?
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They will just shorten the warranty again, no problems.
HGST drives have a 3 year warranty. That's fairly reasonable for a consumer-level drive.
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also, i wouldn't worry about helium escaping, since most metals aren't porous enough for that. my guess is WD will wrap the drive in kitchen foil and all will be fine and dandy.
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Thex Ultrastar drives have 5 year warranty
Hmmm. I thought I saw three the other day on Amazon.
Even better!
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"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"
So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.
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Why lower lifetime?
If I start with the drive full of helium, and then some leaks out shouldn't the density of the gas in the drive then be lower? And if less dense gas reduces strain shouldn't the lifetime of the drive then increase?
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If I start with the drive full of helium, and then some leaks out shouldn't the density of the gas in the drive then be lower? And if less dense gas reduces strain shouldn't the lifetime of the drive then increase?
You're assuming it's under pressure. Exactly the opposite. Helium "leaking out" is really normal outside air leaking in. The atmosphere inside the drive enclosure thus becomes denser, robbing life from the device.
Re:Helium (Score:5, Informative)
Then you are not worried about helium leaking. You're worried about oxygen and nitrogen leaking in. Thankfully those are all WAY easier to stop then helium, and a properly designed device shouldn't have trouble.
Re:Helium (Score:4, Insightful)
less dense gas also provides less of a cushion for the drive heads. Lose too much and you get head crashes.
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The air/helium is a fluid bearing, keeping the heads above the platters while they rotate. And it also dissipates heat from the spinning platters. So the head will be more likely to crash and the platters are more likely to overheat as the helium leaks out.
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I know its uncool to RTFA here but I think this was notable.
"The benefit of using helium is that it’s less dense than air, putting less strain on the motor. End result is a five or six platter drive that can spin up to 7200 RPM on less power, while improving reliability of the drive (2.5 million hours MTFB)"
So im guessing if the helium did leak out you would probably just see a somewhat lower drive life.
2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.
I think that will work.
Re:Helium (Score:5, Informative)
The MTTF makes a big difference to large installations. (I don't know what MTFB is besides a typo in the article -- Mean Time to Fail Badly, perhaps? In any case, MTTF is the better measure of hard drives as they're pretty much not worth repairing, as MTBF would measure.)
We have one installation that operates 60,000 hard drives that spin a total of 24*60000 = 1,440,000 hours per day. A MTTF of 2.5 million hours means I can expect one of these drives to fail every other day. While that would be much better than our current rate of 12 failures per day, and would save us a lot of money on maintenance contracts, it doesn't mean the drives are impervious to failure. It just means that their failures are less expensive than our current drives.
I also have a hard time believing any disk manufacturer's claims for longevity, because we often prove them wrong. We bought a handful of "enterprise class" drives for a dozen workstations that claimed a 1.2 million hour MTTF. We had 8 out of 24 drives fail within 50,000 hours (5 years), for an actual MTTF of less than 150,000 hours (the failures happened after burn-in but before the 5 year mark, which is when the machines were replaced.) Claims of 2.5 million hours MTTF just don't ring true.
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The MTTF makes a big difference to large installations. (I don't know what MTFB is besides a typo in the article -- Mean Time to Fail Badly, perhaps? In any case, MTTF is the better measure of hard drives as they're pretty much not worth repairing, as MTBF would measure.)
We have one installation that operates 60,000 hard drives that spin a total of 24*60000 = 1,440,000 hours per day. A MTTF of 2.5 million hours means I can expect one of these drives to fail every other day. While that would be much better than our current rate of 12 failures per day, and would save us a lot of money on maintenance contracts, it doesn't mean the drives are impervious to failure. It just means that their failures are less expensive than our current drives.
I also have a hard time believing any disk manufacturer's claims for longevity, because we often prove them wrong. We bought a handful of "enterprise class" drives for a dozen workstations that claimed a 1.2 million hour MTTF. We had 8 out of 24 drives fail within 50,000 hours (5 years), for an actual MTTF of less than 150,000 hours (the failures happened after burn-in but before the 5 year mark, which is when the machines were replaced.) Claims of 2.5 million hours MTTF just don't ring true.
MTBF is what the spec sheet says, but AFR (annualized failure rate) is what the manufacturers pay attention to. A MTBF of 2.5 million hours translates to 0.35% AFR, which is pretty low. However, looking at Backblaze's studies [backblaze.com] shows that there are drive models that get pretty close to the 1 to 2 million hours MTBF equivalent of AFR. Of course, there's a difference between manufacturers, and this WD drive is actually a HGST drive, and HGST drives tend to be more reliable. There are also differences betwee
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First, it's MTBF, not "MTFB". Mean Time Between Failures.
"MTFB" was a direct quote from The Fine Article, which was either a typo or an idiot editor, and was propagated by the /. poster. It was a minor attempt at a joke. I know exactly what MTBF is.
MTTF is useful when the wear isn't actionable. MTBF would imply that I could do some maintenance like replace the bearings on a hard drive that has 100,000 hours on it and hope to get another 100,000 hours of life from it; but hard drives simply aren't economically serviceable components.
Re:Helium (Score:4, Interesting)
MTBF is NOT the same as expected/rated life. To equate the two is the oldest, most naive misconception in the book. MTBF gives the number of drive-hours between failures, IN A LARGE POPULATION of FRESH drives. For a 2.5 million hour MTBF, if you have 10,000 drives operating, then you expect one failure every 2500 hours. That's 3-1/2 months. Right from the beginning. It does not account for wear. In fact, the failure rate function will not be a straight line. It will rise as the drives age. When the failure rate read off that line becomes very large, you have reached the limit on expected life.
Expected/rated life is determined by analyzing wear factors. They usually don't spec this figure to the user, but it is well known to be on the order of 5 years for a good quality drive that is not probing some kind of new territory in terms of design/technology.
Just for one example of how/why the drive wears out, consider the spindle bearings. They are prelubricated. That lubrication does not last forever, and there are no "oil here" stickers. Helium leakage is just another, new factor to add to all the other wear factors that drives are subject to.
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Just dropped by to point out that an MTBF of 2.5 million hours does not mean that the drive will operate for 2.5 million hours before it fails.
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2.5 MEELION hours works out to a cool 285 YEARS, at 100% duty cycle.
That number does not mean what you think it means. You can look up the precise term, but here's a quicker explanation: If 5 million of these devices (2.5/(1/2 chance of failure) are made and powered up, 1 will fail every hour.
It does NOT mean that they'll all last 2.5M hours and then go poof.
No shit.
That's why it's a MEAN (one type of averaging) time between Failures (or MEAN Time To Failure MTTF, since, as someone pointed out, hard drives are rarely "serviced").
But it does mean that in your home computer (with one or two drives) or a consumer-grade NAS (with a typical 4 drive setup), it does mean that there is a fairly good (but not exactly zero) chance that you will replace (or decommission) the drive because of an upgrade before it actually fails. But if you're a Datacenter with 10,000 o
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I suspect that it is every bit as much used for its high thermal conductivity. Sure, less strain on the motor and if there are lots and lots of platters that could be an issue. But it also helps to keep the whole thing cool.
Re:Helium -- why not H2? (Score:2)
I agree that Hydrogen sounds like a better approach.
1) orders of magnitudes cheaper
2) even less dense
3) much larger molecules, so leakage should be far less
Not inert, true, but that should be possible to deal with.
Re:Helium -- why not H2? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that Hydrogen sounds like a better approach.
1) orders of magnitudes cheaper
2) even less dense
3) much larger molecules, so leakage should be far less
Not inert, true, but that should be possible to deal with.
Nice thought on #2, but incorrect. Hydrogen diffuses through steel quite quickly.
Hydrogen is the bane of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) systems, which have stainless steel walls 1/2 to 1 inch in thickness. New system? Hydrogen comes out of the steel itself, as it contains some. But with time, that might be depleted, but no —more comes in from the atmosphere, or from any replaced components or new seals.
For UHV systems, helium is quite useful for finding leaks. Microscopic or even nanoscopic pathways for the helium atoms to make their way in. One frequently has poor base vacuum, and must hunt around blowing helium on suspected parts. These could be anything: micro-crack in a weld, stress-crack in a feed-through, an improperly bolted seal, a loose bolt. It can get very fiddly.
Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum? (Score:1)
So why not vacuum?
Is it much harder to achieve UHV than filling the cavity with inert gas?
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The reason will be the pressure differential. With vacuum inside, a drive's housing would have to be much stronger. Read: thicker, bulkier, heavier, more expensive, and leaving less room inside for platters / heads etc.
Re:Helium, H2 -- why not vacuum? (Score:5, Insightful)
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drive heads use Bernoulli's principle to 'fly' an incredibly small distance above the platter. Take the gaseous medium out, and you end up with a record needle instead of a magnetic read / write head.
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Sure it isn't the other way around. Let me quote wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Who cares if it's cheaper? Not enough volume. (Score:2)
There's so little space inside a drive to fill, I don't think cost of the gas itself would change by more than a few pennies.
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Hydrogen would also provide a super-cool secure erase facility! And most excellent data center fires :-o.
Yeah, I guess the amount of hydrogen would be quite small..
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Hydrogen would also provide a super-cool secure erase facility! And most excellent data center fires :-o.
I was thinking about that. "Gee, let's put a flammable gas inside something that can get really hot! What could possibly go wrong?"
However, Hydrogen has a pretty high auto-ignition temperature (over 900 degrees F), so your computer would have probably melted into slag long before your hard drive exploded.
Yeah, I guess the amount of hydrogen would be quite small...
True, but figure it's a data center so you have a whole lot of them. Of course, they wouldn't all go up at once, so you'd have more of a pop-pop-pop than a big kaboom.
depends on pressure difference, which can be zero (Score:3)
The permeation rate of helium is roughly:
diffusion rate of seal material / thickness of material * time * pressure difference
The pressure difference term can be made approximately zero using a diaphragm to allow for changes in atmospheric pressure. Any value * 0 = 0, so permeation (leakage) is roughly zero.
Additionally, some seal materials work quite well. But again that's easy when the inside and outside are the same pressure - there's nothing causing the helium to exit, even if it could pass through easi
Re:depends on pressure difference, which can be ze (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. Diffusion depends on the PARTIAL pressure difference of the helium. For helium at one atmosphere on one side, and the atmosphere itself on the other side, the partial pressure difference is one full atmosphere.
Thanks for the correction (Score:2)
Thanks for that.
SMR Drives are fine for archival use (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an SMR 8TB Seagate drive which is marked as an archival drive. It's worked well so far. The problem with Shingle Magnetic Recording drives which I have noticed is that occasionally the drive will "stall" while it rearranges data. This is probably extremely bad for some raid systems as the paranoid ones might think the drive has prematurely died. Still this drive was inexpensive for its size and stores a LOT of data which is handy for backing up my actual RAID NAS system. Just don't use a drive like this in your Raid or you might run into serious problems.
I worry about these helium drives leaking their helium eventually and dying. They claim to have a sealed unit where the seal will last for years which is hopefully the case but you never know...
Re:SMR Drives are fine for archival use (Score:4, Insightful)
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From what I've seen over the years, there's always someone for whom storage density is always a plus, no matter the cost.
The rest of us thank them and wait until the price comes down.
I figure right now, someone with highly specific storage needs is trying to see how soon they can get these.
Totally worth it (Score:2)
If you can have one backup drive to have to manage an offsite variant off, that is already far better than two.
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Currently SMR implementations increase density by only 30%.
Yes but what does it do price wise? When the entire competition is chasing helium it makes for a very attractive alternative.
I only just bought one of these SMR drives (I did my research and I'm only using it for a backup anyway), but one thing that blew me away was that when I graphed price vs size to find the cheapest drive, this year was the first time ever that the cheapest drive per GB was also the largest one. Normally it's about half or 1/3rd of the size of the largest one. I was expecting to come ou
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They will last as long as the warranty, and if not, here's a refurb for you!
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They probably sealed the enclosure just good enough that something else (mechanical bearings, motor, etc.) will likely fail before gaseous exchange becomes the problem.
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cue the helium jokes (Score:2)
But I've got some helium-filled drives, and the mechanical noises from head movement etc are actually distinctively different and higher-pitched.
SMR is a stopgap that will disappear in 2-3 years (Score:1)
No thanks... (Score:2)
Longevity on these will suck, Helium seeps out of everything eventually. so these drives will not just fail for normal reasons but instead fail due to helium leaking out and drawing in standard atmosphere.
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You are right - partial pressure in the atmosphere is extremely low, so the helium will leak out. The seals have to be made to much more stringent standards in order to keep He in the drive, but that won't help for long. It will, however, keep nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 from entering the drive. Essentially, you will end up with a drive filled with very low pressure helium - essentially, vacuum, and the heads will have crashed against the surface of the platters long before that.
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They just need to make the seals good enough that the helium stays in longer than it takes for some other critical component to fail. Nothing lasts forever, including non-helium filled drives.
What did you do to my harddrive?! (Score:1)
And why is your voice so funny?
Note to purchasers (Score:2)
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That's OK, we will just assemble them overseas and ship direct.
Wayback Wednesday? (Score:2)
I thought 8 and 10tb helium-filled drives had been around for a while. Like a year or so.
This is an enterprise-class drive (Score:2)
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Nor can you get your precious samsung vaporware.
Filled with He (Score:2)
Latest Buggy Wagon (Score:1)
Hard Disk Drives are so obsolete. This is like Atlanta Coach Works announcing their latest, greatest, horse drawn buggy. It is lower, longer, wider and has ... SSD is the answer.
more chrome than their 2015 model. Has gas shocks in the suspension, and electric whips for the horses. But still a buggy. I'd rather drive my car.
In 2016
Good for 1.9 years of uncompressed chipmunk songs (Score:1)
Why does SMR require an OS update (Score:1)
The post says:
> Shingled Magnetic Recording drives, can not typically be used natively by the OS
but gives no reference or explanation for this claim. Searching for this claim finds it repeated verbatim on many sites, but no explanation.
The details of the recording technology rarely matter to the OS which treats the device as block-level storage. I'm not saying it's impossible for SMR to require an OS update, but I would like an explanation or reference.
It sounds like problem is that an SMR drive can't w
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Get perpendicular [youtube.com]
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