New Helium filled 6 TB Enterprise Storage
HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), a well known producer of enterprise storage solutions, and now a Western Digital company, is shipping a milestone in Storage Innovation.
The Ultrastar He6: A New Milestone in storage first announced on November 4th , 2013,is now shipping. HGST took HDD capacity and TCO to a new level by launching its revolutionary Ultrastar He6 HelioSeal-drive storage platform. This engineering breakthrough incorporating Helium Gas as opposed to air or a vacume, has enabled HGST to increase capacity while lowering both power consumption and drive temperature at the same time, and in a standard 3.5-inch HDD footprint, using 7 disks.. As a result, it offers today’s best watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight, and TB-per-square foot.
With the amount of data being produced increasing by 43% year on year the storage industry continues to push device capacities higher and higher, moving to a helium-sealed HDD technology is one solution essential to ensuring the reliability of such large capacity HDDs.
As the first and only producer to ship a hermetically-sealed and helium-filled HDD, HGST’s HelioSeal platform provides the highest capacities while significantly reducing cooling and power requirements. Going forward, all future HGST enterprise-capacity HDDs will be built on the HelioSeal platform to better serve the capacity and efficiency needs of evolving data centers.
Recording
This HDD is using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) named as a description of how each layer overlaps the priviouse as in roof shingles. With SMR, relatively wide tracks are written to the disk and subsequently written data tracks partially overlap the previous ones, similar to the manner in which roofing shingles are applied. With careful design and execution, SMR is expected to enable data densities as high as 3 trillion bits per square inch. It is currently the plan-of-record for next-generation products across the industry.
HGST 6TB Ultrastar® He6 3.5-inch HelioSeal™ platform enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs) allow higher densities in massive scale-out environments, reducing storage appliance footprints and driving down total ownership costs.
Benefits in usage by Netflix
Upgrading to the world’s highest-capacity 6TB hard drives and the industry’s first hermetically sealed helium-filled HDDs provided a 50-percent capacity gain while reducing energy needed by 23 percent, saving Netflix 90W per appliance. In addition, Netflix was able to reduce cooling costs thanks to HDDs that run 4-5°C cooler than traditional air-filled 4TB HDDs.
