WD has released a 6 TB hard drive with helium instead of air
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (a subsidiary of Western Digital) has announced a new model of the hard drive Ultrastar He 6 . This is a 3.5-inch hard drive with 50% more capacity than the most capacious HDD to date. At the same time, it consumes 23% less energy and by itself is 38% lighter than 4-TB disks.
WD achieved such a breakthrough due to an extraordinary design solution: the hermetic HDD case is filled not with air, as usual, but with helium.
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Helium is seven times lighter than air, and its thermal conductivity is much higher. This leads to lower heating and energy savings. The helium hard drive at 7200 rpm is about 4-5 degrees colder than normal.
HGST has not yet announced the price of this model, but it is an “enterprise-class” hard drive, that is, it will be sold to manufacturers of servers and server storage arrays. It can be assumed that the cost of helium HDD to 6 TB will be at least one and a half times more than the cost of modern disks to 4 TB, plus the "helium mark-up" for advanced technology. Especially as the prices for helium have recently increased greatly.
"I would say that helium is one of the major advances in the hard drive industry," says Fang Zhang, market analyst at IHS. He pays attention not only to the increase in HDD capacity by one and a half times, but to a serious reduction in power consumption, which is very important for data centers.
One of HGST's customers is Netflix, which broadcasts billions of hours of HD video for its 40 million paid subscribers. The upgrade to Ultrastar He 6 will allow it to seriously optimize the infrastructure and reduce costs. For many other manufacturers of server solutions, one and a half times increase in information density is a very important factor. For example, the same HP SL4500 server with 60 disks used to hold a maximum of 240 TB, and now - 360 TB, while the server's power consumption is reduced by about 20%.
By the way, one more side effect of the hermetic case is that Ultrastar He 6 hard drives can work under water. Perhaps this can be used in systems with liquid cooling.
Helium filling the case does not prevent in the future to apply innovative magnetic recording technology, such as HAMR and SMR. Moreover, on a helium platform, these technologies will even better manifest themselves.
WD achieved such a breakthrough due to an extraordinary design solution: the hermetic HDD case is filled not with air, as usual, but with helium.
')
Helium is seven times lighter than air, and its thermal conductivity is much higher. This leads to lower heating and energy savings. The helium hard drive at 7200 rpm is about 4-5 degrees colder than normal.
HGST has not yet announced the price of this model, but it is an “enterprise-class” hard drive, that is, it will be sold to manufacturers of servers and server storage arrays. It can be assumed that the cost of helium HDD to 6 TB will be at least one and a half times more than the cost of modern disks to 4 TB, plus the "helium mark-up" for advanced technology. Especially as the prices for helium have recently increased greatly.
"I would say that helium is one of the major advances in the hard drive industry," says Fang Zhang, market analyst at IHS. He pays attention not only to the increase in HDD capacity by one and a half times, but to a serious reduction in power consumption, which is very important for data centers.
One of HGST's customers is Netflix, which broadcasts billions of hours of HD video for its 40 million paid subscribers. The upgrade to Ultrastar He 6 will allow it to seriously optimize the infrastructure and reduce costs. For many other manufacturers of server solutions, one and a half times increase in information density is a very important factor. For example, the same HP SL4500 server with 60 disks used to hold a maximum of 240 TB, and now - 360 TB, while the server's power consumption is reduced by about 20%.
By the way, one more side effect of the hermetic case is that Ultrastar He 6 hard drives can work under water. Perhaps this can be used in systems with liquid cooling.
Helium filling the case does not prevent in the future to apply innovative magnetic recording technology, such as HAMR and SMR. Moreover, on a helium platform, these technologies will even better manifest themselves.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/200816/
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