This book is divided into three chapters. The first chapter discusses the experimental results and compares with the equations used to generate the tables. These equations are supplemented by a vapor pressure equation, which represents the 1958 He-4 scale of temperature that is defined in terms of the vapor pressure of helium-4. R/HeliumNetwork: Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network allows anyone to earn a new cryptocurrency, HNT, by building out a massive Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.
We live in an amazing time. Every day new and innovative apps change the way we interact with the world. Map Your Hike apps have changed the way I work out by mapping my weekend hikes. I then share those accomplishments with my community of friends and also follow celebrity achievements.
I recently followed a small team in pseudo real time as they attempted to summit the tallest mountain in the world… Mt. Everest… without supplemental oxygen. They documented their journey on social media. I was virtually invited into their tent, and I followed their ascension route over a period of weeks as the climbers acclimated to the high altitude.
What it Takes to Make a Breakthrough
To climb Mt. Everest, a lot of things have to come together to make the impossible possible. Technological advances in various disciplines (GPS, cold weather gear, accurate weather forecasting) now make summiting a possibility for hundreds of adventurers each year. The first known attempts to climb Everest started in 1922, and it took over 30 years before Hillary and Tenzing made the first summit in 1953. Twenty-two years later (1975), Junko Tabei (from Japan) became the first woman on the summit (and 38th overall).
We often forget the years of investment required to make a breakthrough. Our helium sealed (HelioSeal™) hard drive is the perfect example. At high altitude, the lack of oxygen becomes deadly for those attempting to summit Everest. The human body needs air. So does a hard drive. The read/write heads inside of a hard drive actually fly over the disk surface on what we call an “air-bearing”.
Without air, the heads will crash into the disk. But the problem with air is that it creates turbulence. So engineers sought after a less dense element. Hydrogen is the least dense element. But it won’t work. The 1937 Hindenburg disaster provides a good lesson for why the use of flammable hydrogen is a bad idea. Helium is the second lightest and second most abundant element in the observable universe. As Helium is inert, it doesn’t react with anything. Being 1/7th the density of air, replacing the air with helium reduces turbulence inside the drive, delivering a myriad of advantages.
The Helium Advantage
Helium comes with various advantages that deliver great benefits to end-users:
- Squeezing tracks closer together means more data tracks per disk = more data per HDD.
- Thinner disks = more disks (5 disks are now 8 disks) = more data per HDD.
- Thinner disks require less power to spin.
- Helium creates less drag, requiring less power to spin the disks.
- Less drag = less noise. (Helium drives are less annoying to listen to!)
- Sealed drives keep helium in and keepcontaminants out.
Keeping Helium In
HDD manufacturers have historically used helium in the manufacturing process when writing the delicate servo code, similar to putting parking stripes on a newly paved parking lot. The servo code helps the drive know where the data is stored on the otherwise “blank” disk and must be very accurate. Helium enables very accurate servo writing, but after the servo code is written, the helium is replaced by air.
The reason is simple. While the small size of helium benefits servo writing, it is extremely difficult to seal the helium within the drive. Anyone who has purchased a helium filled balloon knows that after a few days, the helium leaks out. Investing over 15 years of R&D, HGST solved the sealing challenge and launched our first high volume 6TB HDD (Ultrastar He6) years before the competition. As I mentioned above, sealing the microscopic helium particles in not only keeps helium from leaking but it also keeps much larger contaminant particles out, improving drive reliability. Although not an approved use, we have demonstrated the seal’s effectiveness by immersing running drives in a tank of non-conductive cooling liquid.
[Tweet “The Rise of Helium Drives #HDD #cloud”]
Thinner Atmosphere Allows Thinner Media
Years before the first consumer smartphones became mainstream (2007), our San Jose Research Center demonstrated a helium sealed prototype HDD. Research continued as we installed our first laser welding machine over a decade ago. Constrained to the 1” high form factor, we used thin disks to increase the number of platters from 5 to 7 disks to reach from 6 to 10TB. Using even thinner media, and incredible mechanical ingenuity, we packed in 8 disks for our 12TB Ultrastar He12. All while still maintaining the same enterprise specifications as previous generations.
Rise Above the Rest
Public cloud service providers now offer inexpensive storage and compute with a world-wide footprint. Any startup can deploy a new app without first building a data center. Low storage cost enables new applications, and they can instantly compete with established companies.
The key to achieving the best TCO is to reduce power consumption while packing more data into the same HDD footprint. Helium makes today’s high capacity hard drives a possibility. We are now shipping our largest HDD ever, the HGST Ultrastar He12. At 12TB, the He12 provides 50% more capacity than the nearest 8TB air product. And uses 54% less power per TB. All enabled by HelioSeal technology.
A Recipe for Innovation
You might think of storage as a simple ingredient, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We spent decades perfecting HelioSeal, or helium sealing, starting way back “in the olden days” before smart phones even existed.
The perfect recipe for innovation combines massive storage mixed well with a dab of compute, and then filled with a great idea.
Maybe we didn’t help the climbers climb Everest, but we certainly provided key storage technology that enables them to share their experiences with the world. When your friends share a photo of their kids on social media, or share a video clip of their kitten on a popular video site, you can know that without helium and high capacity storage that we pioneered, none of it would be possible.
We provide the key storage ingredients for the best ideas.
Learn more about HelioSeal and our helium drives here.
Helium, the most noble of the noble gases, long thought to be completely inert and thus too standoffish to bond with other atoms, recently surprised chemists by forming chemical compounds after all.
Last year scientists reported producing the compounds—crystals made of sodium and helium atoms—but could not understand how they formed. Now a new team of researchers has offered an explanation: Helium manages to combine with other atoms without making any chemical bonds—that is, without sharing or exchanging any electrons. The element does this by shielding positively charged atoms from each other, acting as a buffer between their repellent charges. “They have proposed an explanation, and I like it,” says Artem Oganov, a chemist at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and leader of the group that initially discovered the helium compounds. “This model is predictive and it explains all the observations we have so far.”
The compounds are stunning because scientists had thought helium extremely unlikely to combine with other atoms. This is because a helium atom is loath to give up its two electrons, which perfectly fill its only electron shell. Every atom has such shells, which hold specific numbers of electrons and structure these negatively charged particles around the atomic nucleus. Atoms prefer their shells to be totally full, and will bond with other atoms that can take or give an extra particle or two to fill out a shell. Elements with shells that are already full and have no electrons to lend are called noble gases—and helium, the smallest of these, is considered the most inert. “And then came this wonderful work last year,” says California State University, Northridge, chemist Maosheng Miao, leader of the team that offered the new explanation. Miao’s graduate student, Zhen Liu, was lead author of the paper, which was published March 5 in Nature Communications. “They found that if you put sodium and helium together and compress it to pressures like at the center of the Earth, sodium can actually react with helium and form stable compounds.” At first some scientists thought helium might be sharing electrons after all. But Miao’s team suggested an alternative explanation: Maybe helium is not giving or receiving any electrons, but is somehow combining with sodium anyway.
Universal Gas Constant
High-enough pressure can crush a collection of sodium atoms to the point that the extra electron on each atom gets squeezed out, turning all the atoms into positively charged ions. Each ion then repels all its neighboring ions, because like charges push against each other. Miao and his colleagues reasoned that if helium atoms could come and sit in between sodium ions, the distance between the positive charges would increase—and the repulsive energy would lessen, stabilizing the material. “I think this is the first time ever that there’s no chemical bond involved, and yet you can form a stable compound,” Miao says. “Very clever work,” says Roald Hoffmann, a Cornell University chemist who was not involved in the research.
R Values Chemistry
Based on their hypothesis, Miao’s team performed exhaustive computer calculations using the quantum mechanical laws governing each atom, and found that indeed such compounds should work. “It was exciting that the idea turned out to be correct in the computations,” says Eva Zurek, a chemist at the University at Buffalo, S.U.N.Y., and a member of the team. “We could also predict new compounds that have not been studied previously.” The scientists hope experimentalists will try to create the new compounds, which include combinations of helium with magnesium fluoride and calcium fluoride.
The discovery may also have implications for the composition of elements thought to exist deep inside our planet. Scientists had thought helium, lacking a way to bond with other elements, could not possibly be locked away inside Earth’s rocks. “Now it becomes increasingly clear that this is a gross oversimplification,” Oganov says. “Even helium, the most inert of all, is not actually as inert as we thought. It can actually form stable compounds and be retained in the Earth’s mantle.”
Where To Buy Helium Gas
In the future chemists would like to find more general rules to predict when such unusual molecules could arise, because under high pressure many of the normal laws of chemistry do not apply. “This is a weird kind of chemical bonding,” says Richard Dronskowski of RWTH Aachen University in Germany, a collaborator on the team that discovered the sodium–helium combination. “If you think about it for a while, everything’s perfectly reasonable but you don’t expect it at the beginning. It’s fascinating.”
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