HGST HDD With Helium Inside (Replacing Air) in 2013
Enabling seven disk platters into 3.5-inch drive for 5.6TB
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on September 14, 2012 at 2:50 pmHGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), a Western Digital company, announced a new helium-filled HDD platform, which is at the forefront of advanced technology for increasing capacity and significantly reducing TCO for enterprise and cloud customers.
With products expected in 2013, the new platform enables HGST to go beyond its five-platter design, providing a path for higher capacity storage and lower customer TCO for years to come. With industry-wide challenges in scaling current areal density technologies, this new platform allows HGST to design seven-platter drives in a standard 3.5-inch form factor that will extend the capacity and cost-per-gigabyte curve for many product generations to come. In addition, the inherent benefits of the platform, including the helium fill, allow HGST to improve datacenter TCO on many levels: capacity, power, cooling and storage density.
New Platform for Reducing TCO
With the explosion of data resulting from mobile devices, Internet services, social media and business applications, corporate, cloud and big data customers are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and their bottom line. Also, new storage models, such as cold storage, are evolving in ways that require enormous amounts of data to be stored and available within a moment’s notice. These hyperscale datacenters must deploy massive amounts of storage with the best TCO to help them manage their costs and growing storage needs. And when it comes to TCO, numbers matter most – cost-per-terabyte, watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight and TB-per-square foot.
The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, delivering advantages to HGST’s sealed-drive platform. The lower density means dramatically less drag force acting on the spinning disk stack so that mechanical power into the motor is substantially reduced.
The lower helium density also means that the fluid flow forces buffeting the disks and the arms, which position the heads over the data tracks, are substantially reduced allowing for disks to be placed closer together (i.e., seven disks in the same enclosure) and to place data tracks closer together (i.e., allowing continued scaling in data density). The lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction of helium also mean the drive will run cooler and will emit less acoustic noise.
"The benefits of operating a HDD with helium fill have been known for a long time. The breakthrough is in the product and process design, which seals the helium inside the HDD enclosure cost effectively in high-volume manufacturing," said Steve Campbell, CTO at HGST. "We are excited about the introduction of this platform, which demonstrates HGST technology leadership and is the result of more than six years of development in materials science, mechanical engineering and process technology. Thanks to the hard work of our research and engineering teams, our initial pilot lines are up and operational, putting HGST in position to introduce this technology first into the market."
"As a technology innovator, HGST continues to invest in multiple R&D efforts that will help us win new customers, gain deeper market penetration and deliver a significant return on investment for our customers," said Mike Cordano, president of HGST. "Our new breakthrough platform delivers unprecedented innovation with new features optimized to meet the performance, scalability, efficiency and TCO demands of both corporate and cloud datacenters, which could not be achieved using conventional techniques. With these improvements, customer interest has been positive and we look forward to qualifying our new drives in 2013."
The new, helium-filled sealed-drive platform was demonstrated at the Western Digital Investor event in Irvine, CA. At the event, HGST is comparing the power consumption between a helium-filled drive and an equivalent air-filled drive side-by-side, demonstrating a reduction in power consumption for the helium-filled drive of 23%. Taking into account the extra capacity coming from two additional disks, the improvement in watts-per-TB is 45%. In addition to consuming less power, the drive operates four degrees Celsius cooler, requiring less cooling in the system rack and data center. This reduction in power and associated cooling cost contributes to the lower TCO of the helium-filled platform. The critical watt-per-TB metric will further improve over time as the helium-filled drive platform enables higher drive capacities in future product generations.
HGST will release specific capacities points and product specifications when the platform launches in 2013.
Comments
The first HDDs were not sealed and suggested to air contamination. It was the same with drives with interchangeable disk packs for mainframes. As far a we know the first sealed units were introduced around 1973 with 14-inch devices like IBM 3340 (70MB) and with the arrival of Winchester technology. Then all of them were sealed, full of air.
This idea to replace air by helium is not new. We discover a patent (5454157) filed in 1994 by Maxtor and Seagate on a disk drive having a hermetically sealed disk chamber capable of being filled with gas, helium or nitrogen. Another one (8194348) from Western Digital was filed in 2010 concerning a novel disk drive including a hermetically sealed helium-filled enclosure. On its side, HGST published in 2008 a patent (8094409) on Method and system for monitoring gas in sealed hard disk drives with feedback, filed in 2008. All current manufacturers have studied this possibility but Toshiba (no patent found).
But there is often several years to transit from new idea into a final product.
HDD capacity was essentially increased by pushing areal density up to now. But, with current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, we are approaching a barrier in bits and tracks per inch, called supra-paramagnetic limit. Helium is a new way to advance without increasing the areal density, just by adding more disks.
Density of helium is one seventh that of air. Consequently there is less drag on platters and the motor necessitates less power, the HDD being finally cooler. More importantly the fluid forces between disks and heads are diminished, then it's possible to put more platters and more heads into the same volume.
This first announcement of HGST is for a 3.5-inch unit with seven platters, but it's not clear if the company is using thinner disks or diminishing the distance between them. Today highest capacity in this volume is 4TB with five disks, meaning that the first helium rotating device could reach theoretically 5.6TB next year, but we don't wait for better specs in term or rotational speed, transfer rate or access time.
HGST is the first one to announce this interesting technology, having succeeded to design a drive completely sealed with helium and that can be produce in mass quantities at a reasonable price.
The company aimed today essentially high-capacity HDDs for enterprise, probably more for backup and archiving ("cold storage"), in 3.5-inch form factor only, but wed don't see any reason to apply the new technology to 2.5-inch HDDs and tomorrow with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) or Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR).
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