[HN Gopher] The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
The Race to Seal Helium HDDs (2021)
Author : Quizzical4230
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-07-09 06:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.westerndigital.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.westerndigital.com)
| rx_tx wrote:
| (2021)
| wigster wrote:
| if helium is better, why not use a vacuum?
| exe34 wrote:
| vacuums tend to collapse on themselves, I think it might be
| more costly in structural elements to prevent that?
| robocat wrote:
| It is better to think of a vacuum within air to be similar to
| a bubble underwater.
|
| Air is like water in other ways too. We slightly "float" in
| air by the weight of air we displace. e.g. 80kg person is
| approximately 80 litres (density of a body is 1.010
| kg/litre). Weight of displaced air is approx 0.1 gram (1.2929
| gram/litre). So the floating effect of air reduces your
| weight (not mass) by about 0.1%.
| Someone wrote:
| > It is better to think of a vacuum within air to be
| similar to a bubble underwater.
|
| I don't think it is vey similar. That bubble pushes against
| the water to maintain itself; it manages to do that only
| because its "push" increases the higher its pressure and it
| is more compressible than water.
|
| The vacuum, on the other hand, is compressible (if you want
| to call that so), but its "push" remains zero if you do, so
| it needs help to push against the air to maintain itself.
|
| That's why the post your replied to said _"vacuums tend to
| collapse on themselves, I think it might be more costly in
| structural elements to prevent that?"_
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Thermoses have vacuum in the walls, and they are very thin,
| much thinner than a hard-drive case.
| exe34 wrote:
| I think they do get designed specially for resisting the
| vacuum collapsing the walls, but you're right, it can
| probably be done!
| ItsBob wrote:
| What about a partial vacuum?
|
| Perhaps there is a hapy medium between air resistance and
| cushioning? Reducing the air by an amount might help.
|
| Although, I'd be surprised if they hadn't thought of this
| already :)
| fsckboy wrote:
| a partial vacuum of only helium, tightly sealed to keep in
| the helium. The tight seals will work to make sure that
| when there is leakage, only helium leaks in. and if there
| is no helium component to the air outside, you'll just get
| helium leaking out thus improving your vacuum.
| askvictor wrote:
| Maybe structural issues in trying to stop the case from
| imploding?
| tedsanders wrote:
| A startup called L2 drive is apparently working on this:
| https://l2drive.com/vacuum-hdds-the-next-logical-step-after-...
|
| But their website looks pretty stale, and I don't see evidence
| of traction from brief Googling.
| rwmj wrote:
| Hydrogen would also be .. interesting ...
| flir wrote:
| Oh, the huge HDD.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Wouldn't be a fire risk because there's no oxygen available.
| But hydrogen is chemically reactive and over time it could
| corrode or weaken the materials inside the HDD.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| That's not the main problem. The main problem is hydrogen
| is fucking painful to contain.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Not as painful as helium. Bigger atom but it leaks more.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Ah, truth. Brain fart.
|
| ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Section V
|
| Helium leak detection sensitivity is 3 orders of
| magnitude higher.
|
| Memory is fallible, but the code doesn't lie.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Hydrogen even diffuses through (and into) metal - seems not
| doable, not cheaply and without maintenance at least.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Helium atoms are actually smaller than hydrogen atoms, and
| much smaller than hydrogen mollecules.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While that is true, there are metals through which
| hydrogen can diffuse faster than helium, because the
| hydrogen molecules dissociate and ionize when entering
| the metal and the hydrogen ions diffuse through the metal
| individually.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > Hydrogen would also be .. interesting ...
|
| Why?
|
| It's used in power station generators. Why would a hard disk
| be interesting?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-
| cooled_turbo_generato...
| dtx1 wrote:
| Cause exploding hard drives are metal AF
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It won't explode until it's mixed with oxygen.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Hold my beer.
| HankB99 wrote:
| The small amount contained in the HDD would a minimal
| risk.
|
| Larger amounts handled in the manufacturing process,
| OTOH...
|
| I'm curious how the shaft seals for generators manage to
| seal the hydrogen. Perhaps the hydrogen is contained
| within the the generator and not exposed to the seals,
| though I thought one of the reasons for its use (along
| with cooling) was reduced windage losses.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Is heat a concern in HDDs? Vacuum would probably make it
| extremely difficult to cool if it's necessary.
| jfjdkfnjrhr wrote:
| No friction ... No heat
| toenail wrote:
| Sounds like an SSD..
| piva00 wrote:
| SSDs can get pretty hot though.
| SirMaster wrote:
| SSDs have lots of moving parts and friction, all the
| electrons are zipping around the circuits with friction.
| This creates heat :)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Heat can still circulate through the metal parts. Which is a
| better heat transfer medium than air anyway.
| akira2501 wrote:
| A gas provides a "bearing" for the heads to ride on as the disk
| spins below it.
| rob74 wrote:
| Right you are, forgot about that completely! IIRC this is
| important to prevent a headcrash if the drive is jolted while
| in operation (of course within certain limits).
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| It's required to work at all, not just as some kind of
| guard rail. It's like the oil in a normal bearing, the oil
| isn't just to prevent a crankshaft crash in case the car is
| jolted while in operation, the oil is a part of the way the
| thing functions at all in the first place.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Maybe magnetism could work. HDD platters take very strong
| fields to change magnetization these days, so erasing the
| data with the positioning magnet(s) seems avoidable.
| amelius wrote:
| So write too many zeros to your drive, the disk becomes
| demagnetized, and the head will crash?
| Faaak wrote:
| With another encoding like Manchester, it wouldn't;-)
| frud wrote:
| The raw words written to the drive are actually re-
| encoded into slightly larger codewords with nice
| properties like not having too many zero or one bits in a
| row, and error detection/correction.
|
| Plus I think that the 0/1 bits are not encoded as "no
| magnetism"/"some magnetism", but instead as "north
| magnetism"/"south magnetism" since magnetic fields have a
| direction.
|
| And I don't think the magnetic fields on the platters
| have any appreciable effect on the head besides the
| electromagnetic effects at the sensor.
| Cerium wrote:
| Essentially the same problem as with fiber optics. The
| data can't be recovered unless there are frequent bit
| transitions. In that case the data is transformed to
| ensure illegal patterns cannot occur.
| perihelions wrote:
| Also, you could imagine a magnetic bearing whose field
| strength rapidly diminishes as you move away from it, due
| to cancellation, like a Halbach array [0]. I wonder if
| there's a simple geometric configuration for a bearing that
| has this property, as well as the critical property of
| _passively stable levitation_ , maybe based on diamagnetic
| or superconducting materials [1].
|
| edit: Maybe something in this direction? [2]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbach_array
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_bearing
|
| [2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070006849/downloa
| ds/20... ( _" Development and Testing of a Radial Halbach
| Magnetic Bearing"_)
| rasz wrote:
| Heads ride on cushion of gas, would instantly friction weld
| into platters in vacuum.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Friction or cold/vacuum welding at that point?
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Metal sticks to each other in vacuum
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding
| ramchip wrote:
| "Abundant" in the infographic is questionable... in the universe
| yes, but on Earth not really.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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
| vertnerd wrote:
| "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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| And then it swings up and hits you with _" a way that it
| doesn't scathe the seal"_.
|
| Plenty of "unscathed" around, but I don't think I ever met the
| "un"-free word.
|
| Reminds me of the P.G.Wodehouse "far from gruntled" (
| https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2011/05/words-...
| )
| AndrewSwift wrote:
| [scathing remark deleted]
| dmurray wrote:
| You need to read _How I Met My Wife_!
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-
| my-w...
| amelius wrote:
| Sometimes facts are simple.
| yummypaint wrote:
| Yeah i don't get the unnecessary vagueness. They are the
| smallest atoms. It's like they are afraid of accidentally
| educating the reader.
| kragen wrote:
| this terror of accidentally including a fact is one of the
| worst of many plagues afflicting journalism today
| fckgw wrote:
| It's a company blog, not a newspaper
| kragen wrote:
| that makes it even worse, doesn't it?
| neuralRiot wrote:
| By treating people like idiots they turn them into idiots.
| It's like "The lenght of 5 football fields" or "The weight
| of 10 elephants" are they writing for 3rd graders?
| bjoli wrote:
| And here I was, thinking helium was the tiniest atom unless you
| start counting cations which has it beaten by Li+ and He+
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, at the same number of electrons, the heavier atoms have
| a smaller volume, i.e. they are tinier, because their greater
| nuclear charge attracts the electrons closer to the nucleus.
|
| Li+, Be++, B+++ are tinier than He, but they are ions, not
| neutral atoms. Neutral Li, Be, B are bigger than He, because
| they have an additional electron layer. Both neutral H and H-
| are bigger than He, because their one or two electrons are
| attracted less by a proton than by a He nucleus with double
| charge. H+ is just a bare proton, so it is orders of
| magnitude smaller than any other ion, but it is not a neutral
| atom.
|
| So He is indeed the smallest neutral atom.
| addaon wrote:
| Muonic atoms are many, many times smaller, and neutral --
| so small that the reduction in atomic radius by
| substituting a muon for an electron can catalyze fusion.
| Purely muon helium would be the smallest such. (Tauons
| can't form atoms as their decay time is shorter by orders
| of magnitude than would be needed.)
| adrian_b wrote:
| You are right, so in order to say that the helium atom is
| the tiniest, the statement should be additionally
| qualified, by saying that it is the tiniest among the
| _stable_ neutral atoms, in order to exclude the muonic
| atoms.
| chasil wrote:
| Would neon offer some degree of these benefits?
|
| Is neon more plentiful than helium?
|
| Edit: No.
|
| "...neon is comparatively scarce on Earth... It is primarily
| obtained through the fractional distillation of liquid air,
| making it significantly more expensive than helium due to air
| being its sole source."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...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)?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| If it's made of metal foil, probably. Much more diffusion-
| resistant than rubber. The problem with rubber balloons isn't
| that they have macro- or mesoscopic holes. They lose gas by
| diffusion all over.
| ejdhshsuwisjsh wrote:
| The article talks about how hard it is to contain helium.
|
| Why would you assume that a basic metal foil would keep
| helium indefinitely?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It's right there in the article: it mentions welding of
| aluminum foil seals - for helium.
|
| I have also worked with high vacuum in lab exercises.
| There's a leak finder apparatus using helium because helium
| creeps through the smallest leaks - but they have to be
| leaks! Hydrogen just diffuses through anyway, though not
| quickly through thick metal (I have that from Wikipedia).
| ejdhshsuwisjsh wrote:
| I have to read up on this.
|
| I have seen a YT on someone doing this in a lab env but I
| always assumed that you can't contain it indefinitely
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...so, uh, any idea why balloons suck?
|
| I assume it would be way more expensive but if it lasted
| for decades or more...
| Towaway69 wrote:
| > 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| SSDs are still too expensive for high volume storage.
|
| Enterprise purchases will be much lower, but as a consumer you
| can buy a 12TB helium-sealed HDD for $100-$200, while solid
| state alternatives don't even reach that capacity in a single
| unit and cost 5-10x more.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, I didn't realise that was the
| case.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| 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.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Assuming a drive contains helium at standard temparature and
| pressure, and contains about a liter in volume. That would be
| about 1 gram worth of helium per drive.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Hard drives are much, much smaller than one liter.
| robocat wrote:
| 0.05 gram Helium assuming: (1) half of drive volume is used
| for platters, (2) at 15deg Celcius (3) at 1 atmosphere (I'm
| guessing not pressurised since that would defeat purpose of
| using Helium, although might be less than 1 atmosphere)..
|
| 0.376 litres for total 3.5-inch HDD volume from my first
| Google result: "Width: 101.6 mm, Height: 25.4 mm, Length: 146
| mm". Actual volume used for platters is less than that.
|
| Helium is light ~ 0.169 g/litre from "0.169 kg of Helium is
| 0.999 m3 at 15degC":
| https://microsites.airproducts.com/gasfacts/helium.html Note
| that I think comment assumed one litre of normal air not
| Helium: "The density of dry air is 1.2929 g/litre at STP".
| joezydeco wrote:
| One MRI machine uses about 2,000L of liquid He, which expands
| to around 1:770 in gaseous form. So roughly 1,540,000L of
| helium gas per machine.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| MRI machines borked the MEMS accelerometers in iPhone due
| to helium contamination. I assume most smartphone sensors
| are now helium-tolerant.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Nope. They just added a warning so it's _your_ fault if
| you get any helium atoms in your oscillator.
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/important-safety-
| info....
| Y_Y wrote:
| GE says over its lifetime (roughly 13 years) an MRI machine
| will use about 1e4 litres of liquid helium. Two thousand
| litres is a good estimate for the _capacity_ of a machine,
| but it 's not a useful figure unless you know how often you
| need to replenish it.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Helium drives are basically standard for enterprise hard drives
| now. The reduced drag force allows for using thinner drive
| platters (helium drives can hold up to 10 platters, while air-
| filled drives can only hold up to 6 platters) which boosts
| capacity. Helium drives also use less power, run cooler, and
| the helium gas helps to absorb vibrations that can cause wear
| and tear (useful in enterprise settings where you have 45 or
| more drives in a 4U chassis).
| thinkfaster wrote:
| Helium in the atmosphere is almost two orders of magnitude more
| common than xenon and three times as concentrated than krypton.
| Both are extracted from air.
|
| Even though He is constantly venting to space, alpha emitters
| keep replenishing it.
|
| _Cheap_ helium from 7% CH4 wells is not going to last. But we
| 're not going to run out of He. Just the energy to extract it.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Let me go read the article for you.
|
| Yep, it says right there that a "standard" helium tank is
| adequate to fill 10,000 hard drives. I am going to assume that
| by "standard" they mean 220ft^3 or 250ft^3, even though my
| "standard" for tanks is 125ft^3 because I can comfortably carry
| one of those on my shoulder.
| aaron695 wrote:
| 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_...
| SirMaster wrote:
| I have an 8TB WD RED that has been at 7/100 helium level
| according to Smart 22 for over 2 years now. Still running just
| fine in my ZFS pool 24/7.
| jasomill wrote:
| I have a pair of HGST HDN728080ALE604 drives (8TB Deskstar
| NAS). One has SMART 22 at 100 after 43,239 power-on hours; the
| other is offsite and online, but is the same age and had SMART
| 22 at 100 last time I checked.
|
| My other helium drives (WUH721816AL5204 -- 16TB Ultrastar DC
| HC550) are SAS, and I don't know how to check helium levels of
| these (smartctl reports neither SMART 22 nor anything related
| to helium).
| dale_glass wrote:
| I've got 3 drives at around 20K hours and all 3 are showing
| "100" in helium level.
| cainxinth wrote:
| 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.
| alright2565 wrote:
| > used glass-metal feedthroughs
|
| I wonder if this is still the case. I took a WD helium hard
| drive apart recently and I think I saw just a PCB glued in
| place for the electrical signals. Probably made from very
| special materials, but it looked just like usual.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Glass-metal feedthroughs have been the standard means of
| connecting semiconductor devices during the first decade of
| their existence, when they were packaged in hermetic cases
| made of either metal or glass. Their main problem is to use
| pairs of special kinds of glasses and of metal alloys that
| are matched in their thermal expansion coefficients.
|
| After 1960, better passivating methods for the semiconductor
| chips have been developed, so the hermetic packages have been
| slowly replaced with plastic packages for most applications.
|
| It is likely that the PCB glued in place covers the glass-
| metal feedthroughs, which have metal pins that are inserted
| in connectors soldered on the PCB. It is impossible for any
| case that contains helium to have any part made of plastic in
| any of its walls. Plastic parts like a PCB can only be
| attached externally.
| writeslowly wrote:
| They also invented a new welding technique to control some sort
| of aluminum micro-explosions
| kragen wrote:
| thanks, this is great!
|
| to add a bit more context:
|
| - laser welding has been in use since 01967 and is used not
| only for satellites but also for auto body panels, pacemakers,
| 3-d printing (sls/slm), batteries, etc.
|
| - glass-metal feedthroughs are used in incandescent lightbulbs,
| fluorescent tubes, neon tubes, and vacuum tubes (including crts
| and electron microscopes), because in all cases you need a
| vacuum-tight seal around the wires that lead into the tube.
| special glass formulations with custom thermal expansion
| coefficients have been available for this purpose since at
| least the 01950s. the refrigerator guys may have the cheapest
| ones but they didn't invent them
|
| - nickel plating is the conventional way to make steel
| solderable with electronic solders since forever. it's also
| used, for example, to make battery tabs solderable. i think
| this goes back to the 19th century
|
| that is, the design process the article depicts is considerably
| less daringly original than the author makes it sound. the
| people who made it work deserve a lot of praise, but because
| manufacturing is hard and they had to solve a lot of hard
| problems, not because they're geniuses doing totally
| unprecedented things with brilliant strokes of insight. the
| author makes it sound like that presumably because she doesn't
| know anything about the problem space
|
| if you like that kind of thing, you'll probably enjoy dalibor
| farny's youtube channel where he documents his process of
| solving the problems of his nixie tube factory (including
| vacuum-tight glass-metal seals) in a czech castle
| https://www.youtube.com/@daliborfarny/videos
| kbelder wrote:
| 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?
| BizarroLand wrote:
| This is a good question.
|
| I don't know the answer, but this does make me think of atomic
| sieves like the ones used in oxygen concentrators.
|
| This is an armchair scientist explanation of them, but they
| "concentrate" oxygen by first having atmospheric air pumped in
| and then pressurized. The microsieves have holes so small that
| mostly only oxygen can fit through, the larger CO2 and Nitrogen
| atoms simply won't fit.
|
| Then, pressure is let off and fresh air brought in. The fresh
| air scrubs out the oxygen depleted air and refreshes it with
| standard air.
|
| Then, the pressure decrease allows the oxygen to leak back out
| of the sieves, leaving you with oxygen enriched air.
|
| I don't know if there are any atomic helium sieves, but if you
| can find one it might be a start to testing the question.
| s0rce wrote:
| It would be a vacuum I guess, but generally not in the normal
| sense because this is the case with most metals. You don't
| really consider the interstitial space between the atoms in the
| crystal lattice a vacuum even though there is space for small
| atoms (He/H) to diffuse through.
| avoid3d wrote:
| The OP is imagining a device with a "hollow core" of
| atmospheric pressure helium surrounded by a solid and
| continuous membrane.
|
| Since this hollow core would be much larger than the
| crystalline structures in a metal would this not therefore be
| a very weak comparison?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Pretty sure it would simply equalize to the external pressure.
|
| Consider it another way. If you have such a device with a
| vacuum inside, would it not pull in the external helium over
| time to reduce the vacuum?
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > Pretty sure it would simply equalize to the external
| pressure.
|
| External _partial_ pressure of helium which is extremely low.
|
| > Consider it another way. If you have such a device with a
| vacuum inside, would it not pull in the external helium over
| time to reduce the vacuum?
|
| It would, but only until the partial pressure of helium
| inside is equal to the partial pressure of helium outside
| (assuming the membrane is permeable only to helium). After
| that point the same amount of helium will traverse both ways,
| establishing the equilibrium.
| thinkfaster wrote:
| A real material would. But thermodynamically OP is right,
| you'd get a vacuum.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I don't think so.
|
| Ignoring the fact that what you're describing sounds
| suspiciously like a Maxwell's demon, I think the equilibrium
| would be at a higher pressure because helium escaping against
| an overall pressure gradient would be doing work.
|
| In essence, at the boundary I think the rate at which helium
| escapes would not simply be proportional to the gradient
| created by the internal pressure and the exterior partial
| pressure, but I think would include a term involving the whole
| exterior pressure.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| It's not a Maxwell daemon, it's just a device for which
| nothing but helium exists. In the ideal gas model it would
| indeed create almost vacuum but the second law of
| thermodynamics is not violated since the process is
| symmetrical. Pressure of helium outside is also almost zero.
| avoid3d wrote:
| This relates to the difference between how a real gas and how
| an ideal gas behave in this scenario.
|
| The difference in this situation will be very small in my
| opinion, broadly because the gas molecules in the atmosphere
| still have comparatively high mean free paths and therefore
| won't interact with the "escaping" helium molecules.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Internal pressure would equilibrate to the partial pressure of
| helium in the atmosphere, presuming all other species can be
| assumed to have zero permeability. Osmotic
| pressure/semipermeable membranes is the analogous liquid
| system.
| huppeldepup wrote:
| Cody's lab on youtube did a video on this, with balloons
| thinkfaster wrote:
| It would create an almost perfect vacuum. You could then
| extract work by collapsing the vessel. The free energy for the
| work would come from putting the trapped helium (state 1) in a
| higher entropy state (state 2).
|
| For what it's worth, this is done industrially to separate
| gasses using porous membranes.
| esd_g0d wrote:
| 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...
| striking wrote:
| Before he was a researcher for IBM, he was a "groundbreaking
| physicist", for which the article provides this as the
| evidence: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1998/03/rotating-
| single-oxy...
|
| So, be one of the best in the field, and perhaps folks will
| trust you to do wild open-ended research forever. I think that
| sounds like a pretty reasonable deal.
| numeri wrote:
| Any career in fundamental research is more or less like that.
| From what I've seen personally, academics and government labs
| are the two biggest places you can find the most open ended
| roles. Each comes with their own caveats, of course.
| buro9 wrote:
| 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| patclay wrote:
| You have this backwards, the valve is to let the Helium out.
|
| The watch was designed for saturation diving - people
| essentially living at high pressure in a pressure cylinder,
| breathing a mixed gas which includes a high helium percentage
| (as nitrogen becomes narcotic). This saved them hours of
| decompression every dive - just do one decompression at the end
| of the job.
|
| The problem was despite all of the seals to withstand seawater,
| the watches would let helium in & gradually equalise the
| internal & external pressures. All fine until they came up to
| the surface, when the watch would blow the crystal off, as the
| helium couldn't escape quickly enough to equalise. The Helium
| valve is there to release this pressure on ascent.
|
| The sea dweller was designed as a highly specialised tool for a
| specialised industry, before becoming luxury item.
| m463 wrote:
| I can't help but think of deep sea divers using helium as part
| of their mix, and talking in chipmunk high-pitched voices.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Here's a phone call between US President Lyndon B. Johnson
| and Sealab 2 who were doing just that:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wusrtGfjzZg
| fortran77 wrote:
| Since it's a relatively small volume, why not hydrogen? Is it too
| reactive?
| banish-m4 wrote:
| Even harder to contain than helium. Hydrogen notoriously
| diffuses through many materials and ridiculously-small pores.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| 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.
| nxobject wrote:
| An interesting side-story here is how the R&D here was sustained
| through three corporate acquisitions - from IBM to Hitachi GST to
| WD.
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