
Seagate Begins Volume Shipments of Helium-Filled HDDs, Reveals Their Final Specs - jseliger
http://anandtech.com/show/10284/seagate-begins-volume-shipments-of-heliumfilled-hdds-and-reveals-their-final-specs
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colanderman
Wow, when I was a wee intern at Maxtor's server division ten years ago, I
vaguely remember my boss talking about helium-filled drives. I never realized
the technology had another decade of development to go! Though I guess it's
possible the tech is purely Seagate's, and Maxtor's research was lost in the
merger.

~~~
bydo
I'm sure it's been possible for a while, but just wasn't really necessary.
Hitachi's been doing it for a few years already, for what it's worth.

[http://www.storagereview.com/hgst_ultrastar_helium_6tb_enter...](http://www.storagereview.com/hgst_ultrastar_helium_6tb_enterprise_hard_drive_review)

~~~
linker3000
Correction: It's HGST (now merging with Western Digital), not Hitachi, and the
HGST Helium-filled drives have been available for several years. Seagate is
playing catch-up.

Disclaimer: Works for HGST/WD

~~~
roddux
Off-topic, but I had to ask -- do you have any information as to whether
future HGST drives will be manufactured using WD shops, or visa-versa?

I'd be very sad if HGST lost their prestigious lead as the most reliable drive
manufacturer due to being taken over by WD.

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f_allwein
Another reason to be concerned about peak helium:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/7959624...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/7959624/World-helium-reserves-are-running-out-Nobel-laureate-claims.html)

~~~
cordite
How would hydrogen work instead? Or is it not trustworthy enough if there's an
oxygen leak inside and a spark occurs?

~~~
basicplus2
Large power station alternators are hydrogen cooled.. that's right the whole
alternator is filled with hydrogen. you have to monitor how close you get to
the upper explosive limit.

at a tenth the windage and ten times the heat transfer capacity of air, the
stator and rotor can be a hell a lot closer and magnetic coupling more
efficient therefore massive savings in construction and more efficient energy
conversion to electrical energy

~~~
todd8
Strange, but true:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-
cooled_turbo_generato...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-
cooled_turbo_generator)

\- [http://www.power-
eng.com/articles/print/volume-113/issue-6/f...](http://www.power-
eng.com/articles/print/volume-113/issue-6/features/hydrogen-cools-well-but-
safety-is-crucial.html)

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rbanffy
Warning: may change the pitch of MP3 files.

~~~
radarsat1
This... is a funny comment. :)

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leaveyou
Helium-Filled: yey ! Seagate: hmm..

Aren't Seagate the least reliable HDDs in most of the HDD statistics from data
centers ?

~~~
roddux
According to BackBlaze's data set, Western Digital are the least reliable:
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-
reliability-q4-201...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-
reliability-q4-2015/)

Seagate and Toshiba tie for 2nd, but HGST drives are _by far and away_ the
most reliable.

~~~
jdimov10
Wait, WD are the LEAST reliable, but HGST are the MOST reliable... Isn't that
the SAME company?

~~~
gruez
They're only the same company in ownership; both operate independently of each
other

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bsder
Helium is notoriously hard to contain. I wonder what the MTBF on these drives
is going to be?

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Freaky
They're rated for 2.5 million hours.

~~~
Someone
Ballpark, that's 100,000 days or 300 years. So I guess that's MTBF, not "rated
for", which gives even more the impression that we are talking about per-
device lifetime expectancy.

MTBF means that, in the expected lifetime of all devices combined, the
expected time between failures is 2.5 million hours.

So, if you buy 3000, one will have a failure within about a month (assuming
expected lifetime is larger, but that is not stretching it)

Also, MTBF says nothing about what happens outside the expected lifetime. If
that is 10 years, whether they all break down on the first day of year 11 or
somewhere between year 10 and year 100 doesn't affect MTBF.

So, what do they expect the lifetime of these devices to be?

~~~
Freaky
Yes, it's MTBF, which is what the comment I was responding to asked for.

The warranty is 5 years, and from the datasheet the AFR is rated at 0.35%.

[http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-
content/enterpris...](http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-
content/enterprise-hdd-fam/enterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/enterprise-
capacity-3-5-hdd/en-us/docs/100791104b.pdf)

~~~
Someone
Also note that that is "over a five year service life". So, they do not
guarantee the helium to be still there after that. Given the nature of this
stuff, it likely will slowly escape, but I guess professionals using these
will want to retire them fairly soon afterwards.

~~~
Freaky
Does anyone guarantee anything about _any_ hard disk after 5 years? :)

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guelo
Why not a vacuum?

~~~
baobrien
The heads in an HDD don't actually touch the surface, they ride on the layer
of gas above the spinning platters.

~~~
Freaky
At a flying height of <10nm.

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sytelus
Drive would be 10 TB, 7200 RPM. WD is already selling similar drives for $700
with mean time between failure of about 3X than usual drives and 50% better
rating for workload than non He-filled drives. Given the cost, I guess this
won't matter much to consumers for now.

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pkaye
Rated drive writes per day (.189) are now lower than SSDs (although drive
capacity at this time is higher than most SSDs.)

~~~
cm2187
I wonder if it is even possible to achieve 0.2 write a day given the size of
the disk and the low speed of HDD.

~~~
bluedino
100MB/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours = 8,640,000MB (or 8.64TB) per day

That makes sense because I have performed 7-pass wipes on 1TB hard drives and
it took just about 24 hours (not my decision to do 7 passes, but a customer
requirement)

Of course it's going to vary based on the drive and how far away from the
center of the drive the tracks are, and some high performance platter drives
have benchmarked at 200MB/s.

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themodelplumber
How soon until a Youtube user inhales the contents so we can all watch?

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cant_kant
Two years late. HGST has been shipping helium filled HDDs since 2014.

