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July 9th, 2024

The Race to Seal Helium HDDs

Innovation in storage industry led to helium-sealed hard drives with increased capacity, lower power consumption, and reliability. Physicist Barry Stipe's breakthrough at IBM resulted in world's first commercial helium drive in 2013. Today, Western Digital ships millions monthly, marking a milestone in data storage.

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The Race to Seal Helium HDDs

Innovation in the storage industry led to the development of helium-sealed hard drives, offering increased data storage capacity, lower power consumption, and improved reliability. The journey to create these drives was filled with challenges, from containing helium, adapting manufacturing processes, to sealing the drive without damaging components. The breakthrough came from a physicist at IBM, Barry Stipe, who found inspiration from satellite technology and refrigerator seals. Despite initial setbacks, the project gained momentum under engineer Akihiko Aoyagi, resulting in the world's first commercial helium hard drive in 2013. The technology quickly gained traction due to the rising demand for high-capacity HDDs driven by big data and cloud computing. Today, Western Digital ships millions of helium-sealed drives monthly, marking a significant milestone in data storage technology. This achievement showcases the importance of perseverance, innovation, and overcoming technical challenges in the pursuit of groundbreaking advancements in the industry.

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Link Icon 18 comments
By @buro9 - 6 months
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 22 prior to this.

By @kbelder - 6 months
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?

By @TacticalCoder - 6 months
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 limited edition Rolex Sea-Dweller deep sea model named after him.

By @formerly_proven - 6 months
At least two roads to Rome: HGST/WD and Toshiba use laser welding, Seagate uses friction-stir welding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction_stir_welding).

edit: the close up in the Wikipedia article actually is from a hard drive

By @nxobject - 6 months
An interesting side-story here is how the R&D here was sustained through three corporate acquisitions - from IBM to Hitachi GST to WD.
By @banish-m4 - 6 months
Note that it's possible to (mostly) hermetically-seal non-helium, air-exchanging breather holes of HDDs for use in submerged mineral oil applications. It's typically done by adhering a flexible membrane over the air port.
By @throwaway81523 - 6 months
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.
By @wigster - 6 months
if helium is better, why not use a vacuum?
By @Towaway69 - 6 months
> Western Digital ships about a million helium-sealed drives every month.

I'm surprised that there was such demand for spinning disks, I would have thought SDDs would have replaced them all.

I say ‚was‘ as the article is from 2021.

By @esd_g0d - 6 months
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...

By @fortran77 - 6 months
Since it's a relatively small volume, why not hydrogen? Is it too reactive?
By @rx_tx - 6 months
(2021)
By @Wowfunhappy - 6 months
...I didn't really we had the technology to seal helium at all.

Stupid question, but could you potentially create a helium balloon that never runs out of helium (because it's sealed and doesn't leak)?

By @cainxinth - 6 months
The solution:

- They moved all the casing openings to the top of the drive and used a thin metal foil as a second cover.

- They adapted laser welding techniques from the satellite industry to seal the foil to the casing without damaging components with excess heat.

- They found an aluminum alloy used in aerospace that could withstand the laser welding without cracking.

- To get electricity and data in and out without breaking the seal, they used glass-metal feedthroughs similar to those used to seal Freon in refrigerators.

- To get the solder to adhere when attaching the feedthroughs, they used a nickel plating mask.

By @aaron695 - 6 months
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/wl20q2/just_a_...

By @vertnerd - 6 months
"Helium is notoriously difficult to contain. Its atoms are some of the tiniest in the universe."

It's a good article, and I learned a lot, but every so often it reads like something an 8th grader would write the night before their paper is due.

By @ramchip - 6 months
"Abundant" in the infographic is questionable... in the universe yes, but on Earth not really.