Hundreds of Thousands of Helium HDDs Shipped by HGST

At a press conference organized by HGST in Paris, France, StorageNewsLetter.com asked the question: “How many helium-based drives have you shipped?” Answer from Mike Gustafson, HGST SVP and GM, SSD, SW and solutions:” Hundreds of thousands.”

The first units were shipped last year, the helium technology being revealed in 2012. The company refuses to speak about its own figures, only the global ones including parent company WD. Just for its last financial quarter ended June 2014, the group announced to have shipped 63.1 million HDDs including 7.1 million enterprise units. Hundreds of thousands is not a lot.

Nevertheless, HGST is betting heavily on hermetic helium-sealed HDDs for the future. Its executives even say that its seventh generation 6TB Ultrastar 7K6000 just announced with 5 platters will be its last 3.5-inch air-filled model. All the other ones will use its HelioSeal technology that competitors Segate and Toshiba has refused to integrate into their HDDs, up to now. Most recent 8TB Seagate’s unit is filled with ordinary air.

There are some good reasons for the two rivals. Helium drives are today much more expansive to produce as they integrate 7 platters and 14 heads and need to be filled and completely sealed with helium inside.

On the other hand, HGST will eventually be able for several years to offer the world’s highest capacities in an HDD with two more platters and using less power than the competition, as this technology is compatible with coming SMR and future heat- or microwave-assisted magnetic recording authorizing higher areal densities. According to HGST, the prices of He devices could decrease when the volume production will increase.

Also at the press conference, we learned that HGST will not use helium, one-seventh the density of air, into 2.5-inch HDDs. It’s a good way to avoid vibrations of 3.5-inch disks. But smaller 2.5-inch ones do not have this problem having less friction and resistance.

Furthermore, HGST will use SMR and not any more PMR for new helium devices.

As the He6 and He8 shipping, He10 at 10TB, to come next year, will incorporate 7 platters. This unit will require a special software to manage 258MB rewriting zones allowing only sequential writes.

First known customers of HE8 are Huawei, Inspur, Netflix, Promise Technology and also some big cloud providers.

All helium units incorporate a sensor measuring the pressure of the gas to alert the end user if it’s diminishing. In this case, the HDD is in danger and has to be replaced as it’s not possible to refill it with helium.

That’s why it was intriguing to receive theses past weeks press releases from DriveSavers and Kroll Ontract stating they were able to recover data from helium drives. In reality they try to recover files from drives should data loss occur, but do not open them.

Kaitlin Shinkle, director, corporate communications and events, Kroll Ontrack, send us an email: “In the vast majority of data recovery cases where there is internal damage to an HDD and the drive cover needs to be removed to extract the data, we strongly recommend to our customers that they do not reuse the drive and replace it. We typically return their data on a new replacement drive and not on their original HDD.” She added: “We have not had a scenario where a helium filled drive has lost its seal causing data loss.“

Using its high-capacity HDDs, HGST – if you except its subsidiary G-technology – is entering into storage subsystems with 38.4TB in 4U (Virident Space), and Active Archive at 10PB par rack, now sampling and to be available next year for what the company intends to  replace or to put in front of optical and tape for deep archive. The firm could also go further in solutions following agreements with Amplidata (in object storage) and Avere (in filers), two start-ups in which parent company WD invested.

As far as we know, HGST is becoming also for the first time a software vendor with the launch of ServerCache for SSDs, a caching software for Linux and Windows Servers, to be sold to its customers.

3.5-inch HGST helium-filled 7,200rpm HDD generations
(7 disks, 14 heads)