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"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/heliu...failure-rates/ "In November 2013, the first commercially available helium-filled hard drive was introduced by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The 6 TB drive was not only unique in being helium-filled, it was for the moment, the highest capacity hard drive available. Fast forward a little over 4 years later and 12 TB helium-filled drives are readily available, 14 TB drives can be found, and 16 TB helium-filled drives are arriving soon." Interesting. I do wonder about 5 and 10 years out. Lynn |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
Lynn McGuire wrote:
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates" https://www.backblaze.com/blog/heliu...failure-rates/ "In November 2013, the first commercially available helium-filled hard drive was introduced by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The 6 TB drive was not only unique in being helium-filled, it was for the moment, the highest capacity hard drive available. Fast forward a little over 4 years later and 12 TB helium-filled drives are readily available, 14 TB drives can be found, and 16 TB helium-filled drives are arriving soon." Interesting. I do wonder about 5 and 10 years out. Seems they should be comparing apples to apples by comparing the HGST helium-filled drives to air-filled WDC drives where both are manufactured at the same plant since WDC has multiple [co]manufacturing plants). Different brands would just expose failure rates by brand which could swamp any difference in survival rates between helium and air filled drives. Are the Seagates listed in the table made at the same plant (not just by the brand)? Since heat is the bane of most electronics, and with helium-filled drives running at cooler temperatures, the expectation is that those will have longer survival rates. This is implied in the article by the mention of Drive Days (which is much shorter for helium-filled drives than for air-filled drives). While the data is interesting for enterprise deployments where there are thousands and thousands of drives, it means little to the end user. Either the failure rate is going to be zero or 100%. Only the number of days that helium survives longer than air-filled might have some value, but I suspect the difference will be a few days or couple weeks AFTER YEARS of continual use - which will be of little value to the consumer due to the much higher cost of helium-filled drives. HGST 10TB air-filled drive: $320 sale ($400 non-sale) (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16822146148) HGST 10TB helium-filled drive: $428 (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIA25V58C1045) Without any evidence showing helium drives actually survive longer than air-filled drives -- and under typical consumer use (which means daily power cycling) -- there isn't much impetus to buy helium when sales on air-filled gives a large price break. Helium is a LIMITED resource. Depletion is estimated in about 25 years. https://phys.org/news/2010-08-world-...ze-winner.html (dated back in August 2010) "There is no chemical means of manufacturing helium. What we have was created in the extremely slow radioactive alpha decay occuring in rocks." So if the mechanical drive industry moves to helium, depletion is exascerbated. What are they going to use after the helium is gone? Go back to air? Obviously, or find another non-renewing gas that they can deplete. |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
On 5/3/2018 8:50 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Lynn McGuire wrote: "The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates" https://www.backblaze.com/blog/heliu...failure-rates/ "In November 2013, the first commercially available helium-filled hard drive was introduced by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The 6 TB drive was not only unique in being helium-filled, it was for the moment, the highest capacity hard drive available. Fast forward a little over 4 years later and 12 TB helium-filled drives are readily available, 14 TB drives can be found, and 16 TB helium-filled drives are arriving soon." Interesting. I do wonder about 5 and 10 years out. Seems they should be comparing apples to apples by comparing the HGST helium-filled drives to air-filled WDC drives where both are manufactured at the same plant since WDC has multiple [co]manufacturing plants). Different brands would just expose failure rates by brand which could swamp any difference in survival rates between helium and air filled drives. Are the Seagates listed in the table made at the same plant (not just by the brand)? Since heat is the bane of most electronics, and with helium-filled drives running at cooler temperatures, the expectation is that those will have longer survival rates. This is implied in the article by the mention of Drive Days (which is much shorter for helium-filled drives than for air-filled drives). While the data is interesting for enterprise deployments where there are thousands and thousands of drives, it means little to the end user. Either the failure rate is going to be zero or 100%. Only the number of days that helium survives longer than air-filled might have some value, but I suspect the difference will be a few days or couple weeks AFTER YEARS of continual use - which will be of little value to the consumer due to the much higher cost of helium-filled drives. HGST 10TB air-filled drive: $320 sale ($400 non-sale) (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16822146148) HGST 10TB helium-filled drive: $428 (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIA25V58C1045) Without any evidence showing helium drives actually survive longer than air-filled drives -- and under typical consumer use (which means daily power cycling) -- there isn't much impetus to buy helium when sales on air-filled gives a large price break. Helium is a LIMITED resource. Depletion is estimated in about 25 years. https://phys.org/news/2010-08-world-...ze-winner.html (dated back in August 2010) "There is no chemical means of manufacturing helium. What we have was created in the extremely slow radioactive alpha decay occuring in rocks." So if the mechanical drive industry moves to helium, depletion is exascerbated. What are they going to use after the helium is gone? Go back to air? Obviously, or find another non-renewing gas that they can deplete. Vacuum seems to be the obvious next step. But there are heat removal problems in vacuum. And I am concerned about how long the helium want to stay in the drive. Will these drives all die after five years ? Lynn |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
Lynn McGuire wrote:
On 5/3/2018 8:50 PM, VanguardLH wrote: Lynn McGuire wrote: "The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates" https://www.backblaze.com/blog/heliu...failure-rates/ "In November 2013, the first commercially available helium-filled hard drive was introduced by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The 6 TB drive was not only unique in being helium-filled, it was for the moment, the highest capacity hard drive available. Fast forward a little over 4 years later and 12 TB helium-filled drives are readily available, 14 TB drives can be found, and 16 TB helium-filled drives are arriving soon." Interesting. I do wonder about 5 and 10 years out. Seems they should be comparing apples to apples by comparing the HGST helium-filled drives to air-filled WDC drives where both are manufactured at the same plant since WDC has multiple [co]manufacturing plants). Different brands would just expose failure rates by brand which could swamp any difference in survival rates between helium and air filled drives. Are the Seagates listed in the table made at the same plant (not just by the brand)? Since heat is the bane of most electronics, and with helium-filled drives running at cooler temperatures, the expectation is that those will have longer survival rates. This is implied in the article by the mention of Drive Days (which is much shorter for helium-filled drives than for air-filled drives). While the data is interesting for enterprise deployments where there are thousands and thousands of drives, it means little to the end user. Either the failure rate is going to be zero or 100%. Only the number of days that helium survives longer than air-filled might have some value, but I suspect the difference will be a few days or couple weeks AFTER YEARS of continual use - which will be of little value to the consumer due to the much higher cost of helium-filled drives. HGST 10TB air-filled drive: $320 sale ($400 non-sale) (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16822146148) HGST 10TB helium-filled drive: $428 (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIA25V58C1045) Without any evidence showing helium drives actually survive longer than air-filled drives -- and under typical consumer use (which means daily power cycling) -- there isn't much impetus to buy helium when sales on air-filled gives a large price break. Helium is a LIMITED resource. Depletion is estimated in about 25 years. https://phys.org/news/2010-08-world-...ze-winner.html (dated back in August 2010) "There is no chemical means of manufacturing helium. What we have was created in the extremely slow radioactive alpha decay occuring in rocks." So if the mechanical drive industry moves to helium, depletion is exascerbated. What are they going to use after the helium is gone? Go back to air? Obviously, or find another non-renewing gas that they can deplete. Vacuum seems to be the obvious next step. But there are heat removal problems in vacuum. And I am concerned about how long the helium want to stay in the drive. Will these drives all die after five years ? Heat transfer in a vacuum works via radiation. Thermal transfer via radiation is faster and suffers no attenuation than for conductive transfer through a medium. Think about it: if thermal transfer (radiation) were not possible through a vacuum, this would be a very cold planet. None of the sun's heat would reach us. Sealed drives are new with helium. Previously the drives were not sealed. There was a sinter filter that let pressure equalized inside and outside the drive. https://www.howtogeek.com/127433/wha...n-hard-drives/ The heads need to fly over the platters. That cannot happen if there is no gas inside the drive. Vacuum drives would have the heads sliding across the surface of the platters, like how floppies worked. Heads fly off the platter to eliminate wear. |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
On Thu, 3 May 2018 20:50:21 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:
What are they going to use after the helium is gone? Depends what they can get cheap. They might experiment with another noble gas--or they might try hydrogen. Then again, solid state storage might become more practical as the tech improves. |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
On Fri, 4 May 2018 23:06:01 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:
The heads need to fly over the platters. That cannot happen if there is no gas inside the drive. Vacuum drives would have the heads sliding across the surface of the platters, like how floppies worked. Heads fly off the platter to eliminate wear. Magnetic levitation? ;-) (Easy for me to say since I'm not the one who has to develop the technology.) |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
Mark Perkins wrote:
VanguardLH wrote: The heads need to fly over the platters. That cannot happen if there is no gas inside the drive. Vacuum drives would have the heads sliding across the surface of the platters, like how floppies worked. Heads fly off the platter to eliminate wear. Magnetic levitation? ;-) (Easy for me to say since I'm not the one who has to develop the technology.) Not sure the heads would be close enough. Flying height with gas is just a few nanometers. The drives are not sealed but a cleaned air mixture is used inside and a sinter filter used to keep out particles from outside air that might enter the drive. At high altitudes, pressure drops outside (so air leaves the hard drive), so the air inside can become too thin to support the minimal flying height. http://www.dell.com/support/article/...high-altitudes http://knowledge.seagate.com/article...language=ja_JA There's probably some physics involved where if the gas molecules are too few for flying height that there is too much resistance or turbulence from molecular gas collisions. I suspect they won't ever approach the atomic radius of molecular oxygen (O2). Atomic size of nascent oxygen is 60 pm but it immediately bonds to an O2 molecule which is ~120 pm. Nitrogen's atomic size is 65 pm. Clean room air gets into the hard disk during manufacture. It is an air mixture. They could use pure oxygen but you already know the explosive potential of pure oxygen, plus pure oxygen is toxic. Maybe they went to helium (140 pm) because the manufacture techs like talking in high-pitched voices. Anything other than an air mixture means the techs assembling the hard disk would have to wear breathing appartus, like a bunch of scuba divers out of water. I was wondering why they didn't use nitrogen instead of helium. It's because helium is an inert gas. For long-term storage and to prevent corrosion, parts are stored in environments comprised of inert gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, or xenon. Nitrogen is not an inert gas. However, it takes some extreme scenarios for nitrogen to be corrosive. For example, to make ammonia requires directing nitrogen and hydrogen over a hot iron plate. While not inert, dry nitrogen isn't that active. Liquid nitrogen is used to super-cool high-density chips (we built 3 mainframes on a 3" die which had to be in liquid nitrogen when operating). So why not use dry nitrogen with its lower viscosity and lower atomic size instead of helium? Nitrogen and oxygen are both a poor conductor of heat. That's why air which is used as an thermal insulator. See: https://www.engineersedge.com/heat_t...vity-gases.htm Helium conducts heat 8 times better than nitrogen or oxygen. Hydrogen (which is reproducible) is also a good thermal conductor. Remember what happened to the Hindenburg airship? When the limited supply of helium gets more rare and its prices soar, we'll probably be seeing hydrogen- filled hard disks (if rotating magnetic media is still used by then). |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
On Sunday, May 6, 2018 at 12:36:12 AM UTC+8, wrote:
Depends what they can get cheap. They might experiment with another noble gas--or they might try hydrogen. Then again, solid state storage might become more practical as the tech improves. Hydrogen is small, so leakage is worse than Helium. |
"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
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"The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates"
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