The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#121

Post by perihelions » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 4:03 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #30

akira2501 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A gas provides a "bearing" for the heads to ride on as the disk spins below it.

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.

Also, you could imagine a magnetic bearing whose field strength rapidly diminishes as you move away from it, due to cancellation, like a Halbach array [0]. I wonder if there's a simple geometric configuration for a bearing that has this property, as well as the critical property of passively stable levitation, maybe based on diamagnetic or superconducting materials [1].

edit: Maybe something in this direction? [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_bearing

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070006849/downloads/20... ("Development and Testing of a Radial Halbach Magnetic Bearing")

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#122

Post by kragen » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

fckgw wrote: post #83

kragen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this terror of accidentally including a fact is one of the worst of many plagues afflicting journalism today

It's a company blog, not a newspaper

that makes it even worse, doesn't it?

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#123

Post by neuralRiot » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #79

yummypaint wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By treating people like idiots they turn them into idiots. It’s like “The lenght of 5 football fields” or “The weight of 10 elephants” are they writing for 3rd graders?

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#124

Post by banish-m4 » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 10:27 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #119

banish-m4 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the main problem. The main problem is hydrogen is fucking painful to contain.

Not as painful as helium. Bigger atom but it leaks more.

Ah, truth. Brain fart.

ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Section V

Helium leak detection sensitivity is 3 orders of magnitude higher.

Memory is fallible, but the code doesn't lie.

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#125

Post by kragen » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 11:07 PM UTC

neuralRiot wrote: post #123

kragen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this terror of accidentally including a fact is one of the worst of many plagues afflicting journalism today

By treating people like idiots they turn them into idiots. It’s like “The lenght of 5 football fields” or “The weight of 10 elephants” are they writing for 3rd graders?

technically football fields do have a well-defined length at least. often this sort of thing is lampooned as 'americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system' but i've seen it in overseas journalism as well. i don't see anything of this in the article in question, though, except for 'atom-sized holes', which seems entirely appropriate

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#126

Post by octacat » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 12:39 AM UTC

aaron695 wrote: post #44

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…

3 disks 8TB from 2020, WD, 100%.

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#127

Post by lazide » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 4:19 AM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #64

kbelder wrote: post #58

What would happen if you had a rigid structure that helium could permeate, but nothing larger could, and then filled it up with helium and waited? Would most of the helium exit, until it was balanced with just the partial pressure of helium in the atmosphere? That would be nearly a vacuum, wouldn't it?

This is a good question. I don't know the answer, but this does make me think of atomic sieves like the ones used in oxygen concentrators. This is an armchair scientist explanation of them, but they "concentrate" oxygen by first having atmospheric air pumped in and then pressurized. The microsieves have holes so small that mostly only oxygen can fit through, the larger CO2 and Nitrogen atoms simply won't fit. Then, p…

Essentially gas reverse osmosis?

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#128

Post by lazide » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 4:20 AM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #118

banish-m4 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MRI machines borked the MEMS accelerometers in iPhone due to helium contamination. I assume most smartphone sensors are now helium-tolerant.

Nope. They just added a warning so it's your fault if you get any helium atoms in your oscillator. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/important-safety-info... .

Legalese - even cheaper than engineering, apparently.

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#129

Post by adrian_b » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 4:51 AM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #77

I received a HDD only last year where the SMART status immediately reported a failure for status 22, and it led me to https://www.backblaze.com/blog/smart-22-is-a-gas-gas-gas/ It's an immediate "return the drive" scenario, as something happened between factory and the SMART test and the drive is no longer within spec. Thankfully an easy returns and replacement process, but an eye opener too, I hadn't heard of SMART 2…

SMART-supporting HDDs can execute several kinds of self-tests, e.g. long test, short test or conveyance test.

On Linux these can executed with "smartctl", which can also be used to read the error logs after the tests finish. The long test can take almost a day on big HDDs, while the other tests take only a few minutes.

After I had some problems with a bad HDD, I have begun to always execute all the SMART tests whenever I buy a HDD. Of course, if any test fails, the HDD must be returned immediately and the vendor cannot refuse to replace it when the request is backed by the failed SMART acceptance tests.

This is a good habit, because even if such events are very rare, I have still encountered a few HDDs that have failed the tests, so I have returned them and I have received other good HDDs.

Re: The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)

#130

Post by Scoundreller » Thu, Jul 11, 2024, 7:00 AM UTC

m463 wrote: post #94

TacticalCoder wrote: post #91

Fun fact: the Rolex "deep sea" sea-dweller contains Helium and an Helium valve. I'm not too sure how they keep the Helium from escaping. James Cameron (who made the movie The Titanic) actually strapped a Rolex sea-dweller "deep sea" to a little robot submarine and sent it to 10 000 meters deep to see if Rolex was full of shit or not. Turns out the "veblen good" did quite well and didn't break. And James Cameron got a…

I can't help but think of deep sea divers using helium as part of their mix, and talking in chipmunk high-pitched voices.

Here’s a diver checking out an air pocket in a sunken boat finding someone alive in an air pocket (most of the recording is the guy at sea level, but you really get the chipmunk from the diver):

https://youtu.be/LrvRwNaE7Eo?si=bmFzXBmiC1QUwnIF