Re: Helium [was: t-bird screwing up]
On 11/1/22 01:50, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 06:32:17PM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
[...]
I think, but don't know for sure, that they were also helium filled drives,
a guaranteed disaster.
They used the helium to make the heads fly lower, and when the helium leaked
out, and air leaked in,
Possible.
the heads flew too high to read the disk. I don't know where Seagate
recruited the engineers who thought
up that idea,
Whatever, even I with an 8th grade diploma, knows you cannot keep helium
anyplace for very long. Put it in a monel metal
bottle with walls an inch thick and its molecules's are so small that 10% of
it is gone in 6 or 7 hours. And these
jerks thought they could seal it up in a drive housing 1/16" thick?
This is only a half-truth. You know what goes out faster than helium?
Vacuum. And there was a whole glorious epoch in electronics which did
rely on keeping vacuum "in". You should have some fond memories of
that.
That doesn't mean that Seagate didn't botch the implementation, perhaps
especially in your batch, mind you.
I'll buy that, but the power diff of 20% might have had some wishful
thinking
effect. I'd be far more concerned with head flying height. With helium. and
similar aerodynamics, flying height, given perfectly smooth surfaces which
spinning rust does not have encouraged them to take advantage of that, but
if the drive leaks, the head is going to fly too high. I my case,
neither drive
gave any indication of trouble until it just dropped offline in the
middle of the
night. I replaced it with a 1T Samsung I had bought for a different
project, and was
busy recovering some of my last 25 years of history from Amanda backups on
another 2T drive of the same model # that also went face down before I
was able to
get it all. Most of that history gone forever.
So I bought a stack of samsungs 1T SSD's and started from scratch. That,
because I didn't know, wasn't warned, led to 20+ installs because by
the time
I had stuffed a hot potato in Orca's mouth, it would not reboot, stopped
dead
looking for brltty and no one could tell me how to get rid of it
completely..
So only a re-install was possible. The bullseye installer thinks, if it
see's a usb
to seriel convertor, it installs and links both brltty and orca, which
wipes out the
usability of the machine for someone who can hear, not too well at 88
yo, but
having orca pronounce at 500% of normal volume, spelling out every key
pressed in the
same monotone voice forever is extremely distracting, and at no time
in those 20+ installs. did it ever ask me if I was blind.
Someone finally mentioned I should unplug the usb stuff. I squawked the
installer s/b
fixed to at least ask and was essentially told to STFU. To have the
installer do that
w/o asking was the biggest problem I've had in 24 years, although the
network setup
runs it a a close second. usb to seriel convertors are used for many
other things besides
braille printers.
This folks [1] do some assessment three years after they started having
helium drives in their mix and the results are not as clear cut as yours.
I tend to trust them, since as a cloud storage provider, they go through
more hard drives in a year than we both could have, had we started at
the beginning of our lives. The cool part about them is that they keep
a tab on their failure rates and /publish/ them, for all of us to see.
Cheers
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-failure-rates/
Interesting read.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/>
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