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Does anybody have a Helium drive more than 5 years old?
On Wednesday, August 19, 2020 at 5:10:16 AM UTC+8, Paul wrote:
The Helium gas is guaranteed to stay inside for 5 years. Does anybody have a Helium drive more than 5 years old? They arrived 2013 IIRR. Not yet here. In fact, I am not even sure how tell if a hard drive is helium filled ? Lynn |
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Does anybody have a Helium drive more than 5 years old?
Lynn McGuire wrote:
On Wednesday, August 19, 2020 at 5:10:16 AM UTC+8, Paul wrote: The Helium gas is guaranteed to stay inside for 5 years. Does anybody have a Helium drive more than 5 years old? They arrived 2013 IIRR. Not yet here. In fact, I am not even sure how tell if a hard drive is helium filled ? Lynn Hydrogen atoms will pass through metal. Helium atoms will not pass through defect-free metal, but will pass through the defects. I doubt HDD makers are going to that expense to ensure no defects in each metal shell half, plus the HDD case is not solid metal which necessarily mandates the metal shell is not defect-free. Although users complain their HDDs drive mechanically fail after a few years, obviously only the negative reports of such are visible. Users do not proclaim when their HDDs survive 10 years, or more, which is often the MTBF rating by the manufacturers. Helium drives, despite getting introduced back in 2013, have not accumulated enough failure statistics to really know their real MTBF. They're probably a short-lived fad. Naturally mined helium that took 4.7 billion years to produce is a limited resource not expected to survive more than another 100 years under current consumption, and using it HDDs increases consumption, and artificially produced helium under super-high pressures is too expensive. As the helium reserves get used up, price will go up either due to its increased rarity or through gov't imposed taxation to prod cessation of consumption. Some other technological advantage will be needed for mechanical drives if they manage to survive advanced in flash memory (e.g., memresistors) and other technologies with increased storage density. I've not heard that 5 years is a statistic at the middle to top of a bell curve of measured MTBFs for helium drives. I think that's just a guestimate but while figuring HDDs get replaced before that, so the guestimate is longer than either estimate use-time or the warranty. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/heliu...failure-rates/ May 3, 2018 and: https://www.zdnet.com/article/do-hel...-failure-rate/ which references the Backblaze data. The conclusion is that helium-filled HDDs do not outlast air-filled HDDs, but there is some fudging with analysis of the stats. The market is not to end users, but to data centers where reduction in power and reduced heat (so less air conditioning load) are important. In the 3-year test by Backblaze, leakage is not a problem, but no idea how that may degrade with longer use of the He drive. Apparently some drives implement SMART attribute 22 to estimate the remaining helium inside the shell. Perhaps the measure is based on pressure [change] or a probe that is affected by density of helium atoms. According to the above Backblaze article, helium has not proven to lengthen longevity of HDDs, but that wasn't the point of going to helium which was to up arial density by letting the heads fly closer to the platters and reduce drag on the platters to reduce power consumption. The reduction of power is unimportant to end users in a deployment of 1 or a dozen HDDs, but for data centers running thousands of them. The advantage of increased arial density will be short-lived. Since the MTBF is not improved, there is little need for helium HDDs by end users other than to experiment. Oh, helium transfers heat faster than air, so those drives cool faster; however, end users can implement better cooling setups or solutions. To the end user, like you and me, there is no advantage nor disadvantage to using HE drives -- if you omit the higher price tag for He drives, but then end users never omit that decision factor. Reduced electrical and air conditioning load are a factor that data centers consider that would offset the increased price for He drives, not something that end users could even measure on such a small scale deployment of HDDs. The maker and model of the HDD and looking up the specs is how you would identify which are helium filled. There's nothing about the drive's outward appearance that will identify air versus helium filled. The stick-on label might sometimes help, like "HelioSeal" or "He" (HGST) on the label, but many have no such identification on the label. Air-filled HDD: https://www.newegg.com/seagate-exos-...82E16822184842 Helium-filled HDD: https://www.newegg.com/seagate-enter...234-000S-00083 He drive is $23 higher. Perhaps not enough for an end user to care about when buying 1 or 2 of the He drives, but is wasted money for nebulous advantages in such a deployment scenario. The price increase is very important to data centers that are purchasing hundreds to thousands of HDDs unless the added cost of He drives is offset, and more, by reduced electrical load for the drives and air conditioning, but there seems little to no longevity to He versus air. |
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Does anybody have a Helium drive more than 5 years old?
Lynn McGuire wrote:
On Wednesday, August 19, 2020 at 5:10:16 AM UTC+8, Paul wrote: The Helium gas is guaranteed to stay inside for 5 years. Does anybody have a Helium drive more than 5 years old? They arrived 2013 IIRR. Not yet here. In fact, I am not even sure how tell if a hard drive is helium filled ? Lynn The HGST drives have a SMART indicator for Helium (22). Seagate apparently don't have the same thing on theirs. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/heliu...failure-rates/ You would think there would at least be a sticker with "Caution: Helium Inside" on it :-) As a way of bragging. Paul |
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