81–90 of 138 posts
Are HDD's a significant consumer of the world's helium, in the scheme of things? I had thought helium was used only in a few bleeding edge drives, and they went to normal air as the tech matured.
Assuming a drive contains helium at standard temparature and pressure, and contains about a liter in volume. That would be about 1 gram worth of helium per drive.
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vacuums tend to collapse on themselves, I think it might be more costly in structural elements to prevent that?
What about a partial vacuum? Perhaps there is a hapy medium between air resistance and cushioning? Reducing the air by an amount might help. Although, I'd be surprised if they hadn't thought of this already :)
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Yeah i don't get the unnecessary vagueness. They are the smallest atoms. It's like they are afraid of accidentally educating the reader.
this terror of accidentally including a fact is one of the worst of many plagues afflicting journalism today
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Maybe magnetism could work. HDD platters take very strong fields to change magnetization these days, so erasing the data with the positioning magnet(s) seems avoidable.
So write too many zeros to your drive, the disk becomes demagnetized, and the head will crash?
Plus I think that the 0/1 bits are not encoded as "no magnetism"/"some magnetism", but instead as "north magnetism"/"south magnetism" since magnetic fields have a direction.
And I don't think the magnetic fields on the platters have any appreciable effect on the head besides the electromagnetic effects at the sensor.
If anyone has a helium drive you can check it's levels - S.M.A.R.T. ID 22 If you are bored I'd be interested to hear what level it's at on old drives. Like is it still 100% after a year? [edit] I assume the 100/64h means 100% maybe not [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/windows8/comments/11ndk0o/what_is_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis_and_... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/wl…
I wanna be this guy when I grow up. Seriously, how realistic is it to get a job like this guy's? Open ended, no rules, just solving problems... Most days I'm fine with a boring specialized engineering career, but this one got to me...
So, be one of the best in the field, and perhaps folks will trust you to do wild open-ended research forever. I think that sounds like a pretty reasonable deal.
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The article talks about how hard it is to contain helium. Why would you assume that a basic metal foil would keep helium indefinitely?
It's right there in the article: it mentions welding of aluminum foil seals - for helium. I have also worked with high vacuum in lab exercises. There's a leak finder apparatus using helium because helium creeps through the smallest leaks - but they have to be leaks! Hydrogen just diffuses through anyway, though not quickly through thick metal (I have that from Wikipedia).
I assume it would be way more expensive but if it lasted for decades or more...
Are HDD's a significant consumer of the world's helium, in the scheme of things? I had thought helium was used only in a few bleeding edge drives, and they went to normal air as the tech matured.
Assuming a drive contains helium at standard temparature and pressure, and contains about a liter in volume. That would be about 1 gram worth of helium per drive.
0.376 litres for total 3.5-inch HDD volume from my first Google result: "Width: 101.6 mm, Height: 25.4 mm, Length: 146 mm". Actual volume used for platters is less than that.
Helium is light ~ 0.169 g/litre from "0.169 kg of Helium is 0.999 m3 at 15°C": https://microsites.airproducts.com/gasfacts/helium.html Note that I think comment assumed one litre of normal air not Helium: "The density of dry air is 1.2929 g/litre at STP".
Are HDD's a significant consumer of the world's helium, in the scheme of things? I had thought helium was used only in a few bleeding edge drives, and they went to normal air as the tech matured.
Assuming a drive contains helium at standard temparature and pressure, and contains about a liter in volume. That would be about 1 gram worth of helium per drive.