Air vs Helium HDDs: Why does helium win in speed and eco-friendliness? 🌱⚡

You might not think much about the gas that fills mechanical hard drives (or even think about spinning oxide drives at all), but it turns out that swapping air for helium in these drives has some interesting benefits. With helium-filled drives on the market, what's the deal? 🤔

What's wrong with the air?

Having air inside a hard drive seems logical enough. It's the same substance that surrounds the disk, and it's been that way since the beginning in mechanical drives. However, at the speeds and scales at which drives operate, "thin air" can prove to be more of a hindrance than you think. 💨

Air is relatively dense, and the resistance it presents to the moving parts inside a hard drive can have negative consequences for energy usage and wear. Furthermore, as engineers try to increase storage capacity in the same amount of space, the effects of air turbulence become an issue.

How does helium help?

As the mechanical hard drives are pushed ever closer to their physical limits, you need small victories wherever you can get them. Switching from air to helium comes with numerous benefits. Helium is much, much more a lot Less dense than air. That's why helium-filled balloons float, and the free helium rises to the top of the atmosphere, resulting in us constantly losing our limited supply into space. 🎈

This low density significantly reduces the problems caused by air in hard drives, leading to drives that are better in almost every way.

Helium discs can store more things

Helium-filled hard drives allow for more platters to be fitted (thanks to their thinner, less dense gas), which means more total storage within the same footprint as an air-filled drive. This is especially important for data centers, servers, and other applications where extra physical space costs money. If you could increase your storage by half simply by swapping out existing drives without needing to buy more server capacity, that would be a huge win! 🏆

Helium discs can go faster

With less resistance, you can spin the platters faster, and the read/write heads can move more freely and precisely. It's not going to turn a mechanical drive into an SSD, but any speed increase is welcome given that mechanical drives are relatively slow. Whether you know it or not, you rely on mechanical drives in data centers every day when accessing information on the web, so this really benefits everyone. However, most helium drives aren't really designed for speed, but rather for reliability and efficiency. ⏩

Helium means cooler, more energy-efficient discs

Less friction, less wear, less heat, and ultimately, less electricity are important reasons why large server operations may choose to switch to helium-filled hard drives. Greener drives add up significantly when using thousands of them. Data centers already face numerous energy challenges, so addressing this problem on multiple fronts makes a lot of sense. 🌍

Keeping helium in is a challenge

One of the main obstacles with helium discs is preventing the gas from escaping. Helium is a tiny molecule that can easily leak through seals if they're not perfectly designed. Manufacturers use specialized airtight seals to trap the helium inside the disc, but these seals increase production complexity and cost. Over time, even with advanced sealing techniques, there's always a small risk of helium leakage, which can degrade the disc's performance.

Helium itself is a scarce raw materials, and there are fewer of them every day. So helium discs must also grapple with the ethics of using this gas, which is also needed for medical devices and other priority applications. Disc manufacturers use recycled helium to combat this problem. ♻️

You don't need a helium hard drive at home

While there are clear benefits to using helium instead of air in a mechanical hard drive, those benefits are worth the extra cost in data centers, where the hardware quickly pays for itself. While you can buy helium-filled hard drives on sites like Amazon, there's no particular reason for a typical desktop user to bother.

It's easier to just buy two regular hard drives if you need more space, and if you want speed, use an SSD instead. Even cheap SATA SSDs are much faster than any mechanical hard drive. It's a very interesting development (ha!) for mechanical drives, but technologies like HAMR are much more relevant to people like you and me. 🚀