Western Digital released the world's first 10-terabyte HDD model with helium instead of air

Western Digital is one of the best-known manufacturers of hard drives. Back in 2012, this company announced its intention to produce hard drives, inside which would be helium, and not air. A little later, several models of such HDDs were released, and a couple of days ago the corporation announced the release of a new HDD model, with a capacity of 10 terabytes, with helium instead of air.

According to the manufacturer, such a hard drive consumes less energy than the "air" model, in addition, a relatively low price per 1 GB of capacity has become the hallmark of the "helium" HDD. The new model is called Ultrastar He10, at the moment it is the most capacious HDD in the world.
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Such carriers are mainly positioned as a hard disk for corporate customers, who constantly need more and more storage space for corporate data. The SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) used in WD drives from WD has a relatively low rewrite speed, which does not particularly affect the organization of archives.



There are several advantages of helium disks, among which are the following points:

- The disks of the hard drive package will be thinner. This means an increase in the number of plates, and this, in turn, will increase the disk capacity by about 26%. The weight of the "helium" hard disk with seven plates will be equal to the weight of the hard disk with air inside and five plates;





- Lightweight disks of the hard drive package will save energy to ensure the operation of the system. So, experts estimate savings of about 23%. When idle, the usual disk with five plates consumes about 7 watts. The same hard disk with helium and seven plates will consume only 5 watts;

- the body of the HDD is sealed, which means that they can be used in immersion liquid cooling systems.



Unfortunately, neither the release date nor the price of the device has been reported by the company. Most likely, the first models of 10 TB helium HDD will not be too cheap, but after a while the price of such hard drives will decrease, as is usually the case in such cases. Moreover, the competitors are not sleeping - the struggle among manufacturers to reduce the cost of storing each gigabyte of information is now a serious one.