6TB Helium Filled Hard Drives

This may not be breaking news to everyone. The drives are sealed with helium, which allows for greater storage capacity and less energy consumption. It may be some time before these drives are affordable and available to every day consumers, but they are still interesting to read about, nonetheless.

TechnologyReview

Gizmodo

Engadget

 

And this is why I hold Hitachi drives above all: they're true cutting edge with a strong sense of balance in the real world metrics that matter: price, performance, power requirements.

Can't wait to try a few hundred of these in my workflows (hope they come out with a NAS line soon...).

 

Doesn't Western Digital own that arm of Hitachi now though? I think they bought it a few years ago.

 

Yeah, they do - but the tech is almost certainly HGST's though...

 

Getting the drive sealed pressurised in a 2.5" form factor wont be fun.

 

I hope 4TB drives get cheap and fast now, but 6TB would be great but I guess they'll be in the consumer market in 1.5 years.

 

In other news, North Korea has failed with their hydrogen sealed hard drives:

 

Five year warranty, I wonder how long they really last?

Why not put a full vacuum in these, that should help even more?

 

That's what I was wondering. Why not a vacuum. If they can fully seal it like that just make it a vacuum, then no friction or resistance at all.

 

Hehe, vacuum wouldn't work because the heads ride on a cushion of gas - air works, helium apparently works better (less drag and stuff). Vacuum would mean the heads would not lift up at all (= instantly scratched disk ...

 

Then you could have a physical stop that wouldn't allow it to go down any further to scratch that disk... hehe.

 

True, they do use the cushion of "air" to hold the head just a bit off the platter. With helium they must have to adjust for this.

But I still wonder if they could use another method to keep the head just slightly off the platter. Maybe that will be the next jump in drive technology.

 

Why not a physical stop so the arm can't go any lower? Seems simple enough.

 

Just guessing, but they make the arm that holds the head very light so it can be moved fast. This might make it to flimsy.

But why not a strong thin coating on the platter?

 

Wouldn't coating the platter with something resilient enough to protect it from regular head crashes simply shift the damage to the head? After all, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

 

Why does the head have to be damaged? If it is also fragile, then put guards around it, maybe teflon so it can coast smoothly. This is not really my area of expertise. When do we bet those holographics drives that were talked about long ago?

 

Why would it be flimsy? You don't change the arm at all. You put the stop on the fixture that holds the arm on the outside of the platter. It just won't be able to go down any further.

But yeah a coating on the platter and there's some near frictionless carbon coatings (like 0.0001 coef of friction) that could go on the head. The problem though with any physical contact despite really low friction, it would eventually wear over time. Then again, if it's like ten years then who cares.

 

The problem is the tolerances you are talking about, a cushon of air will float the head a set distance above the disk and will even out slight changes in height on the platter.

 

I think a physical stop seems like a logical solution, but rotating parts moving at extremely rapid rates pose unique problems.

 

Tis the reason for engineering, tolerances, and geeks with a handful of PhD's.

 

Those same geeks think it's a lot more fun to get high on helium in the back room than it is to design a manual stop for a hard drive.

 

I assume some of us have disassembled a HDD. The arm that holds the read write head is flimsy. Maybe it is by design right now so it can float. But if you add weight, then your random seek times go down because of inertia.

Only ballons can get hign on hellium. Deep sea divers breath hellium without getting high. Then again, if it displaces oxygen, you can get a oxygen deficency type "high".

 

What material and where would you put it to act as a physical stop? Put it on the platter you reduce data capacity and destroy the platter uniformity. Put it between the head and platter and the head no longer reads the data. Support the arm further up and it can't move freely any more and it will bend into the platter with gforces.

I'm sorry guys but I don't think you grasp the sort of precision engineering we are talking here.

 

Maybe I need to change professions then.

 

Physical stops won't work because the distance between head and platter is extremely small - not only that, but the heads need to have some room for movement (in case the hard drive is moved or the platter develops some irregularities, for example). By using a gas-filled environment, they're pretty much self-adjusting - it's the easiest, cheapest method that works perfectly.

The platters are already coated with near-frictionless coating, to further reduce the chance of damage if the heads do touch it.

Helium reduces drag, making it possible to position the heads even more accurately than with air, hence the increased storage capacity.

I personally think the first generation will have an unusually high failure rate