Are all drives (nowadays) helium drives? (and are they indeed, generally, the coolest running drives?)

[McFuddy]

I have cooling issues with my previous setup and in the new setup i'm building Im gradually trying to switch my drives over to helium filled drives as I was under the impression that they generally ran cooler (please correct me if this is not the case).

I usually try to get ironwolf drives but was reading that the exos might also be helium drives nowadays?

So beyond my initatl question of are all drives helium, are there any drives types/brands/models that run particularly cool?

 

[Alecmascot]

I suggest you locate the drive datasheets and see what they say.
Look at the power input to see how much energy they have to dissipate.

 

[joeschmuck]

The purpose was to pack more platters into the same space. Helium is 7 times less dense than air so less friction, more packing of platters and heads in to the same space.

 

[MisterE2002]

i do not understand the "gradually" part. You want to replace good disks for helium disks? Seems expensive solution. Why not more/better fans?

That said, Enterpise drives: Exos and Toshiba MG (i use the latter) are afaik Helium. (And probably cheaper compared with "nas" drives) But also running at 7200 speed.

 

[joeschmuck]

are there any drives types/brands/models that run particularly cool?

5200/5400 RPM drives run cooler as a general rule which is why we do not recommend 7200 RPM drives to be packed into a small space. Those need air to stay cool.

You have 10 hard drives right now, I'm not sure what exact configuration for a total storage capacity however lets assume you have 16 TB of usable storage right now. i would expect that if you are to upgrade your drives, they would also result in a overall larger capacity. So for argument sake let's shoot for 25TB, an increase of about 10TB. You could do that with four 14TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration. these would be 7200 RPM drives but you would have four drives vice 10 drives. If you need more capacity then four 16TB drives would net you approx 29TB usable space.

So if you migrate to four or five hard drives, there must be space and airflow to keep them cool. Think airflow path as well.

As for adding more fans as suggested above, I agree provided the case can support more fans, higher airflow fans, and the drives are in the airflow path.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I have cooling issues with my previous setup and in the new setup i'm building Im gradually trying to switch my drives over to helium filled drives as I was under the impression that they generally ran cooler (please correct me if this is not the case).

The discussion does not make much sense without specifics. What exactly are your cooling issues and what temperature are your drives currently running at?

I am running Seagate Exos X16 drives and they need considerable(!) cooling. At least for my desired temperature of 30-32 C. So helium may reduce heat a bit, but do not expect 5 or 10 degrees less.

 

[joeschmuck]

considerable(!)

Made me laugh just a bit.

 

[Ericloewe]

The difference is sometimes actually surprisingly large, as specified, here's a comparison between Helium and Air for a 10TB size point and SATA interface:

	WD HC510 (Helium)	WD HC330 (Air)	Delta
"Typical"	6.8 W	9.2 W	26%
Idle	5 W	8 W	38%

In this specific case, I think the HC330s are also packed to the brim with platters. If they got it down to 3 platters, I'd expect a meaningful improvement in the figures for the air-filled drives (WD, specifically, seems to be using more lower-density platters in their 10 TB drives, possibly to reserve the good stuff for higher-capacity models). Meaningful asterisk: the HC510 has been retired and it's getting harder to find Helium-filled disks below 12 TB.

That said, I have mixed feelings about Helium drives. On one hand, they're great power-wise and allow for higher densities (further bringing down power per TB at the disk level, with benefits for the rest of the system, as fewer drive bays are needed) and this is very positive. On the other hand, Helium is a rather limited resource, very much irreplaceable for cooling superconducting magnets for MRI scanners, particle accelerators and the like. It's not clear to me that using it in HDDs is productive, though it's certainly more productive than certain... other recent uses.

 

[NickF]

Seems like a good place to post the obligatory BackBlaze failure rates for 2022

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022

Check out the 2022 year-end Drive Stats data, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

www.backblaze.com

 

[doze5]

I had Toshiba N300 10TB with air - more noise, much higher temps up to ~48C and more power consumption. Now I have Toshiba N300 12TB with helium, less noise but still very loud (especially with ZFS), a huge difference in temps: max temp from last days on N300 12TB ~38C, and most of the time it is like ~34C with 0 fans. You have to read the datasheets.

N300 NAS Hard Drive

The 3.5-inch N300 NAS Hard Drive offers unprecedented reliability for NAS and other high-performance storage systems.

www.toshiba-storage.com

Acoustics (idle mode)
20 dB typ. (12 TB - 18 TB) - helium
34 dB typ. (10 TB) - air

Consumption (operating)
6.49 W typ. (12 TB) - helium
9.48 W typ. (10 TB) - air

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

The HGST helium are so quite and vibration free its hard to tell if they actually start up or sit there dead. Somehow they send data, so whattteva...