Will a helium filled hard drive still work after helium has leaked out?

[AdamGrant82]

I have four helium filled 8TB hard drives and one air filled 8TB drive in my Lenovo ThinkStation converted into a home NAS and one of the helium filled hard drive shows a helium level of 6% when last night it was showing the level was 45% About a month ago this drive was showing 100% helium level. I have since moved all the files to another drive in the computer but should I be worried this drive will fail? The drives now failing S.M.A.R.T. due to the helium levels.

The drive in question is the HGST Ultrastar He8 HUH728080ALE604 8TB enterprise hard drive.

[OhYou_]

well for the helium to escape out of the drive, there needs to be a hole big enough for something else to get in and replace it. 

 The concern is water getting in, or more commonly known as h2o, with a molecular weight of 18. luckily nitrogen has a weight of 14 something and oxygen a weight of 16. 

So it's pretty likely that you are now holding a nitrogen filled drive with maybe a bit of oxygen in it. 

 

I guess it would impact the performance of the motor and head movement since thats the whole reason for the helium, so now the drive will consume a bit more power and have slower seek times. I'm not a HGST engineer but I'd think its safe to say the drive can still operate in this degraded state.

[AdamGrant82]

If the seal is broken in the hard drive I didn't notice it the drive looks good no scratches or anything in the drive itself and it was holding at 100% for almost a month then just like that it dropped to 45% last night then 6% today and failed the S.M.A.R.T.  readings. I was looking this up and some say once it reaches 0% the drives firmware will park the read heads and the drive will no longer work. But other's say it may still work and could fail shortly after reaching 0% and should be replaced. Others say it will work fine maybe not as fast as before but it all depends on the drives firmware and if the helium levels are really falling or not. The drives temps are not going up and the read/write speeds seem to be the same as they were before(Benchmarks testing) I will test the read/write speeds after I'm done testing the drive(I'll copy about 7TB to the drive and move the 7TB to a second drive to check speeds)

I did see one person say this could be a faulty sensor that reads the helium levels as falling when they are not. I just have no real way of knowing, is there any signs I should know about with these drives that will tell me the readings are right?

One person also said not to turn off the computer the drive's in because if the drive reaches 0% helium levels the drive may never spin up again.

[Kilrah]

In addition to that it has 6.5 years worth of runtime so I wouldn't take chances, offload the data to a new drive and retire it as precaution regardless, it's had a good life...

[AdamGrant82]

The helium levels are all over the map I'm watching the levels and just before I went to bed last night it went from 6% to 63% and now it's showing 1% helium levels. It seems like every time I check the levels it's showing a different level depending on what the drive's doing it seems like at idle is when the reading is at it's lowest but when I put a load on the drive the level goes up past 50% only to fall once it's idle again I don't get that. I started to copy all the files over from the second drive to test the read/write speeds and so far the speeds are the same as when I got the drive no change(The drive I moved the data over to) and it went from 1% to 55% after 20 minutes when I checked again. Could this be a faulty sensor? 

I already moved all the data from this drive to another one of the drives in the computer(I have five 8TB drives total) I'm trying to get a replacement for this drive the other three of the same model are showing about the same power on hours but they are showing 100% health but will be watching them closely.

[AI_Must_Di3]

Yeah, thats sounds like a sensor erroring out like you are saying. Its good youve backed everything up and are ready for a failure, but this def sounds like a sensor or the software is bugged maybe. It cant get the helium back once its gone, lol, so for it to start reading the other way that its probably sealed and fine and its just that sensor. Now that you are backed up just roll it till it dies. Watch last another 10 years now!!

[AdamGrant82]

Well that sensor like everything made these days was made in "China" no shock it isn't working right Lol

I did run a full surface scan on this hard drive with two different software and both said the drive passed even the WD software passed. I'm still trying to get a replacement from the place I got the drive from I had the drive for only a month or so they messaged me saying they will be sending me a replacement after I sent them the screenshots showing the failed S.M.A.R.T. readings. There's no way this drive could be sold like this with a faulty sensor(if that's what is really going on) because you never know for sure. No ones going to trust it once they see the failed readings even if it goes back in the safe zone.

I will keep watching this drive but if I do get the replacement I will be removing this drive and it will become just a spare maybe for a external hard drive where nothing important will be stored on.