Helium 10 TB Hard Disk

[ellakaren]

Heard a lot about this new technology and I wanted to ask fellow members has anyone used it. It's for enterprise storage only, still how is the response. What are the technical glitches that the HE 10 might have or occur.?

[northwind]

There is even a video posted here of colleagues opening a He drive.
Search this forum and you'll find lots of info.

[day1data]

There is a study here and its shows there is a 3.4% failure rate for the 8TB He drives.

We had a 8TB He drive come in and it was recoverable.
And yes the drive works fine again after it has been opened in a clean room.

I would only recommend these drives for either long term storage or data that isn't acessed very often. Not saying that they are unreliable but if you ask me any drive over 4TB, there is just a much smaller tollerance for failure.

[RolandJS]

Those are also used as NAS drives, correct?

[hdd2fix]

That will be not easy to find some donor for this disk

[ddrecovery]

There is a study here and its shows there is a 3.4% failure rate for the 8TB He drives.

We had a 8TB He drive come in and it was recoverable.
And yes the drive works fine again after it has been opened in a clean room.

Are you saying the drive will read without the He (if only for a short time?) or did you refill it somehow?

[ellakaren]

Thank you all, but if the 8 TB He Drives are opened then are they refilled with Helium?

[day1data]

There is a study here and its shows there is a 3.4% failure rate for the 8TB He drives.

We had a 8TB He drive come in and it was recoverable.
And yes the drive works fine again after it has been opened in a clean room.

Are you saying the drive will read without the He (if only for a short time?) or did you refill it somehow?

The drive we received just had 1 weak head and a few bad sectors, nothing that PC3K couldn't handle. We just opened the drive later on for experimental purposes, because the customer didn't want the drive back.

No, I think it would be very hard to refil the drive with helium. The cover on these drives are extremly hard to remove, almost some sort of glue holding it down. I guess this is because they are technically air tight.
After removing the lid you can smell the helium come out. Then we replaced the lid and did a logical test on PC3K and the drive was reading the same as it was before the lid was taken off.
In the long term i don't know if the drive would have issues without the helium because we didn't test it for long enough.

But for data recovery purposes, eg head swap. From our experience i think the helium drives would last long enough for a full image.

[data-medics]

I think the solution would be to just build a chamber (inside a cean room) to fill with helium and put the drive inside of it before closing the lid. Helium floats up, so can be open underneath to reach in and close the drive. Then probably keep it in there during imaging as it's unlikely to seal well again.

I think the next likely evolution of drives will be even worse though. Vacuum'd out drives with no internal gas for almost zero resistance .

[HaQue]

maybe I suck at physics, but no gas at all would mean nothing for the heads to float on, right?

[data-medics]

maybe I suck at physics, but no gas at all would mean nothing for the heads to float on, right?

There's no such thing as a perfect vacuum, at least not man made. Would always be some amount of some gas in there. Probably would fill with helium first, then vacuum down to just the right pressure.

Maybe I should hurry up and patent this idea so I can sell it to WD later .

That or they could move to some sort of clearcoat, mineral oil lubrication system that'd allow a near zero fly height.

[ddrecovery]

maybe I suck at physics, but no gas at all would mean nothing for the heads to float on, right?

There's no such thing as a perfect vacuum, at least not man made. Would always be some amount of some gas in there. Probably would fill with helium first, then vacuum down to just the right pressure.

Maybe I should hurry up and patent this idea so I can sell it to WD later .

I guess if these was no air inside the drive they could set the heads at a certain height. ie no need for the 'gas' bearing at all?

[data-medics]

There's an idea. But, there'd still be some vibration anomalies even just from the bearings that'd make that unlikely to work. Unless.....you design it with a special channel at the edge of the platters with a mechanism to hold them perfectly stable....we may be onto something here. Perhaps have a sort of system at the edges that a little gear can fit into and act as a stabilizer assembly.