HGST boosts hard drives with helium filling
HGST's helium-filled hard drives pack seven platters where only five were previously available for a 40 per cent boost in capacity.
Developed for the enterprise market, the helium-filled drives pack seven platters into a standard 3.5in form factor. With most large-capacity drives only managing five, that's a 40 per cent boost in storage space - potentially turning a high-end 4TB drive into a 5.6TB behemoth.
Hitachi's drive uses helium to lower the drag acting on the disks. With a density one-seventh that of air - which, incidentally, is the reason helium balloons float - the drag on the spinning platters is greatly reduced, meaning the motor draws less power and generates less heat. The fluid flow forces which buffet the disks and head-positioning arm are also reduced, allowing the platters to be placed closer together - hence the jump from five platters to seven.
Finally, the helium works to conduct heat away from the various components more efficiently than air, making the drive run cooler by some four degrees Celsius, according to HGST's prototype testing.
Not everyone is likely to be pleased by HGST's use of helium, however. The gas is becoming a scare commodity, and its frequent use in medical applications means spare helium for balloons, storage products and making people sound like they're auditioning for a place in the Lollipop Guild of Munchinktown is hard to come by and a potentially frivolous waste of a dwindling resource.
Despite this, HGST has declared that it will be launching the helium-filled drives to market in 2013, initially concentrating on the enterprise and data-centre market. Formal specifications and pricing are expected to be released closer to that time.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyIn all seriousness though, this:
is exactly how I feel about it. Call it a trivial amount if you wish, but helium really is that important.
It always makes me cringe when the other half drags me into Hobbycraft and I see dirty great tanks of helium sitting behind the counter; espeically when you know that it'll be used to inflate balloons which will end up either getting popped, being thrown out or have the helium sucked out of them by people who want to sound like their testicles are being squeezed. Of course I've done all of the above in the past, but I've come to learn just how precious helium is. If you want a silly squeaky voice then just ask someone to actually squeeze your testicles.
As for storage solutions, we've got to find a better way than squeezing incremental improvements out of what is essentially technology from decades ago.
Won't someone think of the children!!
B******s to the children and their party balloons. Or perhaps you'd prefer a world without MRI scanners or scientific research.
My mother always taught me to engage your brain before your mouth (or in this case, fingers). Here's a starter for you.
We've got (best estimates) between 25 and 30 years worth of helium resource left, and like any such estimate I would imagine the depletion will only accelerate as we use more and more of it each year.
It's sad that the second most abundant element in the universe can't hang around on this planet as we can put it to such wonderful uses (Like Up! - that was real right?).
Maybe one day we'll be harvesting helium from off-world sources but the way we over consume every precious resource we can get our grubby mits on I sometimes wonder if we'll be able to keep our society around long enough to get that far.
Yeeeaaaaaah.... there's no such thing.
What the hell did I just (attempt to) read?
actually it is impossible to reclaim once it escapes into the atmosphere, as it has the second lowest density of any gas, it rises to the top of the atmosphere and is blown away by solar winds and radiation. There's in-process helium reclimation for industrial processes that use it a lot, but it's rather expensive to reclaim on a small scale.
While there is not an immediate shortage or lack of supply, it is going to be a long-term issue. As a welder we use helium by the truckload, and don't quite know what we'll do when it's gone.
+1 to that ^^^
Yes helium has a non-zero leak rate which is a function of what material the container is made out off and how thick it is. The leak rates for an all metal container are very low, but not zero, especially porous aluminum.
Gimmick? hard to say, you may just need a fill port and a once yearly filling of the drive. Takes away all the practicality though.
biggest use for helium is industrial chemical processing, second biggest user is welding. everything else is far behind in terms of amount required
A large slice of awesome, that's what. :D
Exactly. I suspect targeting this as a waste of helium is like worrying about global warming due to standby LEDs.
didn't they use a closed loop whit heat pumps to cool the magnets so no helium leaks out. they are not going to use it like the really useless OC competition. liquid nitrogen ok, liquid helium not or at least till we can do nuclear fusion.
The issue with Helium is that the US decided to sell off all its stock (90%+ of the world supply) by 2015. That drove the price right down. If there were restrictions, I once read (YMMV) that a single balloon should cost £150 or so.
Bring on fusion quick. Then we'll have too much of the stuff.
Do you honestly believe a single MRI machine won't get built for the want of helium with this hard drive on the market? ...If it the supply was that critical, you would see toy balloons at £25 a pop at the local fun fair.
Toodle pipski,
Parsnip
The balloons at the fair are so 'cheap' because the US is selling off its helium stockpile! The "Helium Privatisation Act" decision to sell it off kept the price artificially low which meant it was deemed by many uneconomical to try and recycle some of the wastage. It was cheaper to just let it leak out and buy some more.
Helium is rare. We can't make any more of it. We can't catch it when it escapes.
At the moment we need it for our MRI scanners. We need it for radiation detectors. We need it for many industrial tasks. We even need it for our space ships... and Nasa wastes so much of the stuff it's quite sad really given how damn clever so many of them are.
Using up helium so we can all have fractionally faster hard drives is terrible. Not as bad as a silly helium balloon.
You have nobel prize winning boffins (famed for their helium 3 work) saying "helium is far too cheap and is not treated as a precious resource. It's being squandered."
Disclaimer1: sitting at my side is a 90% deflated helium balloon my daughter was bought about six months ago. I know I shouldn't have allowed my other half to buy the balloon but when all her friends were getting balloons what do you do.... you over-consume like everyone else.
Disclaimer2: My daughter has had an MRI and will have more. I'm thankful for our NHS (and the helium they have for cooling their MRI scanners). She has a hard life at times and I'd have to have a heart of pure ice to force her being the only one of her friends without a balloon.
Last point: Next time we're at the fair, I'm going to stop everyone I know from buying the balloons!
The 1996 act is a terrible bit of legislation
I thought the biggest use of helium was for students nights out
' What we have drilled into our heads...your driving force in life is to maximize your own wealth. Therefore it is perfectly rational to maximize your own wealth and destroy the world in which your grandchildren live. Of course, its also pathological' - Noam Chomsky
Reading through the comments, I think maybe it was right first time...
Helium is extremely common in the galaxy as a whole, because stars fuse hydrogen to create it. However, it's comparatively rare on earth. Mainly it's created here by nuclear synthesis, when (I think it's) lithium and boron isotopes break down. This happens incredibly slowly, so the only worthwhile places to actually obtain helium are natural gas reservoirs, where it collects over millions of years and is obtained by us as part of the purification steps. Of course, it's no secret that there's a problem with the availbility of natural gas.
But unfortunately it gets worse. You might think that we'd be enriching our atmosphere with helium which might conceivably be recovered in the same way that other rare atmospheric gases - such as xenon - are recovered. Unfortunately, being light, helium doesn't work that way: it rises to the top of the atmosphere and is lost into space.
So what we're doing now is going through a resource that has always been scarce, and throwing it overboard. This is not smart.
It's about time we finally get over our Hindenburg-induced fear of hydrogen and really start utilizing it to a good effect. After all, given our case here it should work even better than helium, with an added bonus it won't slip out the casing as easily, thus crapping your drive.
I don't get it.
Throw some carbon nanotubes in there and see what happens. Seems to improve everything else.