HGST Ships 6TB Helium 3.5-Inch HDD

HGST, a Western Digital company, is shipping the 6TB Ultrastar He6 HDD drive.

Key OEM, cloud and research leaders working with HGST to qualify the drive include HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and Code42, as well as some of the largest social media and search companies.

Revealed in September 2012, HGST’s HelioSeal platform provides a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come while lowering customer TCO. Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the Ultrastar He6 drive features HGST’s 7Stac disk design with 6TB, making it the world’s highest capacity HDD with the best TCO for cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments.

“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 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, VP of product marketing, HGST. “Not only is our new Ultrastar helium HDD 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.”

Through HGST’s patented HelioSeal process, the Ultrastar He6 drive is the industry’s first hermetically sealed helium-filled HDD that can be cost-effectively manufactured in high volume. The development of the hermetically sealed process is arriving just in time as key market requirements are colliding with HDD areal density constraints. According to IDC, areal density growth rates have slowed, and are expected at a rate of less than 20% per year from 2011 to 2016. Moving forward, HGST’s helium platform will serve as the main platform for new technologies like shingled magnetic recording and heat-assisted magnetic recording where HGST will continue to push the HDD areal density envelope. The helium platform will also serve as the future building block for new, growing market segments such as cold storage, a space that HGST plans to address over the next couple of years.

“HDD industry areal density growth is not keeping pace with the rate of storage capacity growth in enterprise data centers,” said John Rydning, research VP, IDC. “HGST’s proprietary, new, hermetically sealed, helium-filled HDD solution – the industry’s first helium filled platform that simultaneously increases capacity while lowering power consumption and operating temperature – is intersecting the market at a time when IT managers are seeking out capacious and energy efficient new disk drives that will help to reduce the TCO of enterprise storage systems.”

Driving Down Data Center TCO with Helium
The amount of data that companies need to store is growing exponentially, but IT budgets remain flat. With 6TB, a 5.3 idle watts, a weight of 640g, and running at 4-5°C cooler, the Ultrastar He6 lowers data center TCO on virtually every level.

Benefits when compared to 3.5-inch, 5-platter, air-filled 4TB drive include:

Highest capacity HDD on the market

• 6TB, seven-disk design, providing the best TCO

Lowest power consumption with best watts/TB

• 23% lower idle power per drive
• 49% better watts/TB

Best density footprint in standard 3.5-inch form factor

• 50% higher capacity

Lighter weight than standard five-disk 3.5-inch drive

• 50g lighter even with two more disks, offering 50% more capacity
• 38% lower weight/TB

Pushing New Limits:
Ultrastar He6 Enables Liquid Cooling in the Data Center
Data center designers and server vendors are continuing to pack more capability into smaller spaces, and with that, effective cooling is becoming a new challenge due to hotter components and less space for efficient airflow. One solution, which has been explored by many, is liquid cooling. Liquid, which is denser than air, can remove heat more efficiently and maintain a more constant operating temperature. However, traditional drives cannot be submerged as they are open to the atmosphere and would allow the cooling liquid inside, damaging or destroying the HDD. HelioSeal platform provides the a cost-effective solution for liquid cooling as the drives are hermetically sealed and enable operation in most any non-conductive liquid. Today, HGST is working with innovators in this space such as Huawei and Green Revolution Cooling.

The 6TB HDDs are available.

“As a leader in big data solutions, HP is constantly working to improve storage densities. Partnering with HGST on their Ultrastar He6 drive allows HP to continue that leadership; delivering cost effective solutions to keep up with today’s growing storage demands,” said Jimmy Daley, director of smart storage, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP.

“The Netflix Open Connect delivery platform is a highly optimized video content delivery network. We serve billions of hours of streaming video per quarter to over 40 million subscribers,” said David Fullagar, director of content delivery architecture, Netflix, Inc. “As part of our efforts to optimize the delivery ecosystem for Netflix and our Internet Service Provider partners, we strive to build better and better streaming appliances. The high storage density and lower power usage of the Ultrastar He6 HDDs allow us to continue with that goal, and create a great customer experience.”

“Huawei is very excited to be working with HGST. HGST has invited Huawei, one of the world’s leading information and communications solutions providers, to become one of the first helium drive customers in AsiaPac to collaborate on storage applications utilizing the new helium HDDs,” said Fan Ruiqi, president of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.’s storage product line. “With the new HGST Ultrastar He6 drives, Huawei will be able to expand its product line with a strong competitive offering that has industry-leading lower power consumption and operating temperature, and an 87.5% improvement the system storage density compared to the current industry standard.”

“Over the past 20 years, we’ve recorded more than 100 petabytes of physics data and our projected data growth rate is accelerating,” said Olof Bärring, IT department section leader responsible for facility planning and procurement, CERN. “To scale efficiently, we must deploy vast amounts of cost-effective storage with the best TCO. We have tested the helium drive and it looks very promising: it surpassed our expectations on power, cooling and storage density requirements. We’re excited about the opportunity to qualify the HGST Ultrastar He6 HDD in our environment.”

“Our CarnotJet data center cooling system provides simple, high-performance data center expansion that can be dropped virtually anywhere in the world,” said Christiaan Best, founder and CEO, Green Revolution Cooling. “Today a data center using the CarnotJet technology uses half the power of a traditional data center, with servers using 10% – 20% less power, and the facility cooling using an average of 95% less power when compared to air. With HGST’s new breakthrough 6TB Ultrastar He6 drives, we will not only be able to offer the highest storage density per container, but with the drive’s low power and low temperature, we can lower power and cooling costs even further. These developments equal huge savings for our data center customers.”

“Our CrashPlan enterprise endpoint backup is trusted by thousands of leading brand-name organizations worldwide,” said Dan Mack, director of cloud engineering, Code42 Software, Inc. “HGST’s current 4TB enterprise drives help CrashPlan quickly scale to meet our customers’ growing storage needs. We’re now evaluating the new, low-power Ultrastar He6 drives as they provide 50% more capacity in the same 3.5-inch HDD footprint, while helping reduce power and cooling costs.”