Helium-filled WD drives promise huge boost in capacity

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lynn McGuire
  • Start date Start date
Lynn McGuire said:
Helium-filled WD drives promise huge boost in
capacity:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/262274/heliumfilled_wd_drives_promise_huge_boost_in_capacity.html

I can't tell if this is a spoof. The drive will
need to be sealed of course.

Lynn
Click to expand...

Looks like they're mixing in different technologies and claiming the
capacity boost is caused by one of them. With reduced drag, they don't
have to put in bigger motors which means the smaller motors already used
can turn a larger number of platters. Adding platters is an age-old
trick of upping the capacity of a drive.
 
 
Lynn McGuire said:
Helium-filled WD drives promise huge boost in
capacity:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/262274/heliumfilled_wd_drives_promise_huge_boost_in_capacity.html

I can't tell if this is a spoof. The drive will
need to be sealed of course.
Click to expand...

I wonder what they do about the different pressures the drives could
be exposed to. Someone might use one at the Dead Sea, 423 metres
(1,388 ft) below sea level or at an observatory at a high altitude.
Wikipedia says that the highest observatory is the new University of
Tokyo Atacama Observatory, an optical-infrared telescope on a remote
5640 m (18,500 ft) mountaintop in the Atacama Desert of Chile. There
must be a huge pressure difference between those two places.
 
I wonder what they do about the different pressures the drives could
be exposed to. Someone might use one at the Dead Sea, 423 metres
(1,388 ft) below sea level or at an observatory at a high altitude.
Wikipedia says that the highest observatory is the new University of
Tokyo Atacama Observatory, an optical-infrared telescope on a remote
5640 m (18,500 ft) mountaintop in the Atacama Desert of Chile. There
must be a huge pressure difference between those two places.
Click to expand...

Not so huge, but I think they cannot just seal the drives, that
would be very difficult and expensive. Also note that most HDDs
are only specified for 10000ft maximum altitude and may crash
above that. So, 0-3000m is about 1...0.7 Bar. By Boyle's Law,
say volume at 1 Bar is 1l, then volume at 0.7 Bar is 1.42l.

I suspect they will have some kind of flexible membrane
pressure equalizer, that keeps the gasses separated. Could be
done as sort of a "bag" to cause minimal additional pressure
difference. That would also allow use of relatively stiff
materials that are more gas-tight. Apparently, there
have been some materials break-throughs in the recent past,
see for example

http://heliosairships.com/sir-andre-geim-creates-true-helium-leak-tight-graphene

Maybe that is the reason we are getting these disks now.
Running disks in Helium must have been tried ages ago,
but keeping the Helium in seems to be really tricky,
according to the link.

Arno
 
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