James Delahunty
4 Nov 2013 21:46
Western Digital's HGST announced its new hermetically sealed (air-tight) 6TB Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD) that's filled with helium gas instead of air.
Filling it with the noble gas instead of air makes it possible for the Ultrastar He6 to use a 7-Disk design (7Stac) rather than a 5-Disk design, with helium being only one-seventh the density of air.
The high-capacity HDD is intended for use in enterprise environments, particularly data centers that require ever increasing amounts of storage capacity. Not only does the drive have the highest capacity for a standard 3.5-inch form factor, it also uses 23 percent lower idle power per drive, and boasts 49 percent better watts-per-TB.
"With ever-increasing pressures on corporate and cloud data centers to improve storage efficiencies and reduce costs, HGST is at the forefront delivering a revolutionary new solution that significantly improves data center TCO on virtually every level – capacity, power, cooling and storage density – all in the same 3.5-inch form factor," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST.
"Not only is our new Ultrastar helium hard drive helping customers solve data center challenges today, our mainstream helium platform will serve as the future building block for new products and technologies moving forward. This is a huge feat, and we are gratified by the support of our customers in the development of this platform."
According to Western Digital, the new drive has already gotten interest from HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage and CERN.