Western Digital HGST Helium-Filled 6TB HDDs Ready To Ship

By - Source: Toms IT Pro

During this week's Cloud Expo Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, Western Digital subsidiary HGST stated today that it was shipping its 6TB Ultrastar He6 helium filled hard disk drives (HDD).

HGST's helium hard drives are addressing the need for high-density, massive scale-out data centers to reduce power consumption, heat, and cost of ownership.  HGST believes a helium filled, 6TB HDD that consumes 23 percent less power, has a reduced weight of 640g (about 1 pound, 6 ounces), and runs about 4-5 degrees Centigrade cooler (about 29-41 degrees Fahrenheit) than a standard 5 platter, 4 TB air-filled HDD, is going to help accomplish that goal.

The drives are hermetically sealed using HGST's patented HelioSeal process. Since helium has one-seventh the density of air, the moving parts will be less affected by friction-generated heat and would require less power to operate.  Additionally, with less friction comes less turbulence inside the drive, which allows for a 7 platter disk design in the same 3.5 inch form factor as a traditional 5 platter drive.  Just by adding the additional platters the storage density increases without having to increase the physical size of the drive.

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"HDD industry areal density growth is not keeping pace with the rate of storage capacity growth in enterprise data centers," said John Rydning, research vice president, IDC. "HGST's proprietary, new, hermetically sealed, helium-filled HDD solution -- the industry's first helium filled platform that simultaneously increases capacity while lowering power consumption and operating temperature -- is intersecting the market at a time when IT managers are seeking out capacious and energy efficient new disk drives that will help to reduce the total cost of ownership of enterprise storage systems."

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Since these HDD's are hermetically sealed they are also capable of operating in any non-conductive liquid where a traditional HDD would fail. This would allow these HDD's to be liquid cooled which is a more effective method of cooling than traditional air cooling systems.  This may not be a current issue in most data centers but as hardware density increases there is a point where traditional airflow systems become ineffective.  In the future, a switch to liquid cooling systems may become a necessary solution for high capacity data centers.

HGST notified that several key OEM, cloud, and research leaders (HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling, and Code42) and some unnamed social media and search companies have been working closely with HGST to qualify the HDD. Since the HDD's are targeted for large scale data center environments, it may take a while before these drives filter down to the average IT data center.

Pricing was not shown on HGST's site for this HDD, but you can see an overview and additional specifications by visiting Ultrastar He6, the World's first hermetically sealed helium HDD.

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