Development of Helium Sealed High Capacity Hard Disk Drive

抄録

It was known that Helium would improve Head positioning accuracy of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) due to its smaller molecular size comparing with air. But Helium sealed HDD was not available for a long time due to technical difficulty of sealing design and process. We developed Helium sealing technology and HGST started to manufacture 1^st Helium sealed HDD in the world in 2013. Helium sealing technology enabled much larger capacity due to much higher mechanical packaging density using thinner arms/disks, lower power consumption, lower idle acoustic noise and longer MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). Now more than 12 million Helium sealed HDDs were shipped. Helium sealed technology is the enabler for high capacity HDD and Helium sealed HDD became industry standard in Capacity Enterprise HDD market. This paper briefly covers the information of sealing technology, dynamics design and product.