UltraStar He8 | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Tue, 24 Mar 2015 12:16:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png UltraStar He8 | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 HGST starts to sample 10TB HDDs, expects helium-filled drives to thrive https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-starts-to-sample-10tb-hdds-claims-50-of-enterprise-hdds-will-be-helium-filled-by-2017/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-starts-to-sample-10tb-hdds-claims-50-of-enterprise-hdds-will-be-helium-filled-by-2017/#respond Tue, 24 Mar 2015 10:44:57 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=241571 HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Tuesday said that its Ultrastar HelioSeal hard disk drives are now field-proven and rated for two and a half million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). In addition, the company said that it had begun to sample its 10TB hard drives with select customers and that …

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HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Tuesday said that its Ultrastar HelioSeal hard disk drives are now field-proven and rated for two and a half million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). In addition, the company said that it had begun to sample its 10TB hard drives with select customers and that 50 per cent of its enterprise-class HDDs will be filled with helium by 2017.

While helium-filled hard disk drives are harder to produce than traditional HDDs, because helium’s density is seven times lower than that of air, it is possible to install more platters inside such drives and also reduce power consumption of motors. This allows to retain 7200rpm spindle speed on high-capacity hard drives. The manufacturer claims that the helium inside the drives also reduces disk vibration and flutter, which further improves reliability. Finally, since Ultrastar HelioSeal are hermetically sealed, air, humidity and other contaminates are kept out of the drive.

“Based on the patented HelioSeal technology, HGST’s Ultrastar Helium-filled drives are the only drives that improve data center TCO on virtually every level—from storage density, power and cooling costs, to reliability, capacity and more. We also believe it is the only way to get to higher densities therefore higher capacities while maintaining reliability. All of these factors contribute to defining the true TCO of the data center,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST.

wd_hgst_ultrastar_helium_10tb

The company said that so far it has sold about one million Ultrastar HelioSeal HDDs, which is not a lot. Nonetheless, the company believes that in the coming years helium-filled hard drives will account for 50 per cent of its enterprise-class HDDs.

HGST is shipping its 6TB Ultrastar He6 and 8TB Ultrastar He8 helium-filled drives commercially today. HGST’s 10TB Helium HDDs with SMR are sampling with select customers.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Without any doubts, helium-filled hard disk drives are great for datacentres, where every additional terabyte matters. However, it does not look like such HDDs will ever be offered for consumers as they are still pretty expensive to make.

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HGST’s 10TB HDD pictured, set to hit the market in Q2 2015 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgsts-10tb-hdd-pictured-set-to-hit-the-market-in-q2-2015/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgsts-10tb-hdd-pictured-set-to-hit-the-market-in-q2-2015/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2015 01:13:33 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=239990 HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has demonstrated its highly-anticipated 10TB hard disk drive at the Linux Foundation Vault trade-show in Boston, Massachusetts. The new drive is already in mass production and will be released commercially shortly. ZDNet has managed to picture the prototype of the 10TB SMR HelioSeal hard disk drive, the industry’s …

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HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has demonstrated its highly-anticipated 10TB hard disk drive at the Linux Foundation Vault trade-show in Boston, Massachusetts. The new drive is already in mass production and will be released commercially shortly.

ZDNet has managed to picture the prototype of the 10TB SMR HelioSeal hard disk drive, the industry’s first HDD that can store such incredible amount of data. The hard drive features a massive sticker and is clearly not a commercial version of the product, but it proves (assuming that HGST just did not put a sticker on another drive) that 10TB HDDs exist. It is unknown whether HGST demonstrated the hard disk drive in action or not during the trade-show.

wd_hgst_10tb_hdd_helio_seal_zdnet

The HGST 10TB UltraStar HelioSeal hard drive is based on seven 1.43TB SMR [shingled magnetic recording] platters and is filed with helium. Nothing else, including spindle speed, cache size, interfaces, performance figures, etc. is known about the novelty.

The ultra-large capacity HGST HelioSeal HDDs are designed for cool-to-cold storage applications. The main goals of cold data storage applications is to store maximum amount of data per cubic meter of a datacentre while consuming the lowest amount of energy. Typical 42U capacity-optimized storage cluster can hold 360 3.5” hard disk drives. With 10TB drives, capacity of 42U rack will total 3600TB of data.

If HGST releases its 10TB HDDs in the second quarter, then its customers will start deploying such drives sometimes in late Q3 2015. Since the 10TB UltraStar HelioSeal hard drive provides a number of advantages over competing solutions, it is likely that such HDDs will become rather popular among those, who need to store vast amounts of cold data. HGST believes that this year its HelioSeal hard drives will finally be adopted widely.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Looks like HGST is on the finish line with its 10TB HDDs for datacentres. I wonder how long it will take hard drive makers to create 10TB drives for consumers.

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WD, HGST expect helium-filled HDDs to get more popular this year https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/western-digital-hgst-expect-helium-filled-hdds-to-get-more-popular-this-year/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/western-digital-hgst-expect-helium-filled-hdds-to-get-more-popular-this-year/#respond Tue, 17 Feb 2015 21:06:08 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=236165 HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, first announced its helium-filled hard disk drives in 2013 and started their shipments in 2014. Such drives have a number of advantages compared to traditional HDDs, but they still have not gained popularity because both WD and Seagate produce hard drives with comparable capacity that are not …

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HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, first announced its helium-filled hard disk drives in 2013 and started their shipments in 2014. Such drives have a number of advantages compared to traditional HDDs, but they still have not gained popularity because both WD and Seagate produce hard drives with comparable capacity that are not sealed. However, this year a lot may change.

At present HGST offers Ultrastar He hard drives with 6TB and 8TB capacities for applications that require maximum storage density and relatively high performance. Such HDDs compete with HGST’s Ultrastar 6TB hard drives, WD’s Ae 6.3TB HDDs as well as Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity, Enterprise NAS and Archive hard disk products with 5TB – 8TB capacities. While the Ultrastar He products have some advantages compared to rival products, they are still not radically better than competitors, which is a reason of their relatively low popularity.

In the coming months HGST plans to release 10TB UltraStar HelioSeal hard drive that will offer a massive capacity advantage over all existing solutions. The drive is based on seven 1.43TB SMR [shingled magnetic recording] platters and is filed with helium. While Seagate also plans to introduce its 10TB HDD this year (based on six 1.66TB SMR platters), the company will likely do that only in late 2015, which means that the Ultrastar He 10TB will have a significant time-to-market advantage. The release of the 10TB helium-filled drive as well as the ramp of 8TB product will help the drives to gain market share because so far the adoption of such HDDs has been slow.

wd_hgst_ultrastar_helium_10tb

“Helium, as an individual category, particularly as it relates to 6TB drive, probably did not have a material impact [on our business],” said Steve Milligan, chief executive officer and president of Western Digital, during a recent conference call with investors and financial analysts. “We believe that as we transition to the 8TB platform with the helium product, we will begin to see a bit of a larger impact.”

Mike Cordano, the president of HGST, also believes that the use of helium-filled hard drives will increase this year. In an interview with DigiTimes he predicted “a large increase in the use of helium-filled hard disk drives” in data centers in 2015.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The HGST HelioSeal platform will have to offer a clear and consistent advantage in terms of capacity over competing HDDs from all manufacturers to stay relevant. It remains to be seen how the HelioSeal platform will work with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and other upcoming HDD technologies. To keep its HelioSeal ahead of competitors, HGST will have to combine it with all the latest recording methods, which is not an easy thing to do.

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Seagate preps Archive HDDs: 5TB, 6TB and 8TB at low price-points https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-preps-archive-hdds-5tb-6tb-and-8tb-at-low-price-points/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-preps-archive-hdds-5tb-6tb-and-8tb-at-low-price-points/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2014 22:00:57 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=225545 This year both Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp. introduced hard disk drives with breakthrough capacities designed for near line storage applications. Since those hard drives are based on enterprise-class platforms, they are too expensive not only for consumers, but even for cold-storage applications. This week Seagate quietly added the Archive family of hard drives …

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This year both Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp. introduced hard disk drives with breakthrough capacities designed for near line storage applications. Since those hard drives are based on enterprise-class platforms, they are too expensive not only for consumers, but even for cold-storage applications. This week Seagate quietly added the Archive family of hard drives into its lineup, which will combine maximum capacity with affordable price-points.

Seagate Archive hard disk drives are based on 1.33TB shingled magnetic recording platters and are available in 5TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities. The drives feature 5900 revolutions per minute spindle speed, 128MB cache and Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface. The manufacturer declares up to 150MB/s average data rate and up to 190MB/s maximum sustained data rate. Typical power consumption in operating mode of 5TB HDDs is 5.5W, whereas 6TB and 8TB hard drives consume up to 7.5W.

seagate_archive_hdd

Seagate’s Archive series of hard disk drives are designed for cold storage applications and feature “the best” cost per terabyte available today as well as moderate power consumption, according to the company. Since it is hard and expensive to store petabytes of information that is not accessed, used or updated, many datacentres these days build cost-optimized cold data storage infrastructure. Cold data storage solutions do not use RAID or any other sophisticated technologies utilised for “hot” data storage devices. The main goals of cold data storage applications is to store maximum amount of data per square meter of a datacentre while consuming the lowest amount of energy. Seagate’s Archive and WD’s Ae HDDs are designed to do just that: they do not offer truly high performance and are not tailored for maximum reliability. However, they can hold up to 8TB of data while consuming up to 7.5W.

“Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content. Seagate’s new 8TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data center, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives.

At present official recommended prices of the Seagate Archive family are unknown, but Amazon.com offers 5TB, 6TB and 8TB models for $228, $243 and $267, respectively. Note that the prices are for 20-unit packages to be delivered early next year, therefore, actual retail prices are going to be higher. Nonetheless, even at $300 Seagate’s 8TB HDD should be considerably more affordable than HGST’s UltraStar He6 (helium-filled sealed hard disk drive), which costs starting from $722.

seagate_archive_hdd_specs

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will be very interesting to see whether emergence of Seagate’s Archive high-capacity hard drive have any effect on prices of other high-capacity drives. Keeping in mind that HGST’s 8TB drive costs almost two times more than a rival of the same capacity designed for a similar market segment, Western Digital should clearly reconsider the price of the UltraStar He8 HDD…

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HGST’s 8TB hard disk drives are now available in retail https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgsts-8tb-hard-disk-drives-are-now-available-in-retail/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgsts-8tb-hard-disk-drives-are-now-available-in-retail/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:22 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=221282 HGST began to ship its 8TB helium-filled hard disk drives to partners among makers of servers and storage equipment back in September. By now the new drives with unprecedented capacity have made it to retail, but their prices are so extreme that even computer enthusiasts will hardly buy them. HGST’s Ultrastar He8 8TB 3.5” hard disk drives …

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HGST began to ship its 8TB helium-filled hard disk drives to partners among makers of servers and storage equipment back in September. By now the new drives with unprecedented capacity have made it to retail, but their prices are so extreme that even computer enthusiasts will hardly buy them.

HGST’s Ultrastar He8 8TB 3.5” hard disk drives feature 7200rpm spindle speed, 128MB DRAM buffer and SAS-6Gb/s, SAS-12Gb/s or SATA-6Gb/s interfaces. The drive is based on seven 1.2TB PMR platters and is filed with helium in order to shrink the distance between platters without increasing risks and sacrificing performance. HGST declares 205MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate and 4.16ms typical latency for its top-of-the-range HDDs.

At present the Ultrastar He8 8TB are available in the U.S. at Amazon and Newegg for $933 and $899, respectively. In Japan the drive is available at one retail store in Akihabara district for ¥79800 ($695, €559, £438). In mainland Europe the HDD is available starting from €619.

hgst_wd_helium_hdd

HGST’s helium-filled hard drives are not designed for consumers, which is why their prices are so high. It will take years for such HDDs to become more or less affordable. Moreover, not a lot of consumers actually need HDDs with extreme capacities since it is not a problem to install multiple drives into a desktop system or use a low-cost NAS device.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The fact that HGST already ships its Ultrastar He8 to retailers means that it can meet demand from its primary customers. This is a good sign as it means that there are no problems to produce helium-filled HDDs in volumes.

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WD’s HGST introduces new 6TB, 8TB and 10TB hard disk drives https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wds-hgst-introduces-new-6tb-8tb-and-10tb-hard-disk-drives/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wds-hgst-introduces-new-6tb-8tb-and-10tb-hard-disk-drives/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2014 17:17:28 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=211189 HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has introduced three new Ultrastar-series hard disk drives with 6TB, 8TB and 10TB capacity designed for data centre storage infrastructure. The new HDDs utilize WD’s latest technologies – including HelioSeal, new platters featuring perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology as well as all-new platters with shingled magnetic recording …

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HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has introduced three new Ultrastar-series hard disk drives with 6TB, 8TB and 10TB capacity designed for data centre storage infrastructure. The new HDDs utilize WD’s latest technologies – including HelioSeal, new platters featuring perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology as well as all-new platters with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) tech.

All three new Ultrastar drives are designed for cloud datacentres and for cold storage applications (archives). All three are based on the enterprise-class platforms and therefore are optimized for maximum possible reliability depending on actual usage scenario. The key feature of the drives is to store maximum amounts of data while consuming limited amounts of energy and using limited amount of space.

wd_hgst_ultrastar_helium_10tb

General specifications of the new Ultrastar HDDs look as follows:

  • Ultrastar 7K6000 6TB: 3.5” HDD with 7200rpm spindle speed, 128MB DRAM buffer, Serial ATA-6Gb/s or SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive is based on five 1.2TB PMR platters and is not filed with helium. HGST declares 227MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate for 6TB models and 4.16ms typical latency.
  • Ultrastar He8 8TB: 3.5” HDD with 7200rpm spindle speed, 128MB DRAM buffer, Serial ATA-6Gb/s or SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive is based on seven 1.2TB PMR platters and is filed with helium in order to shrink the distance between platters without increasing risks and sacrificing performance. HGST declares 205MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate and 4.16ms typical latency.
  • Ultrastar 10TB SMR HelioSeal HDD: 3.5” HDD with unknown spindle speed and interfaces (SAS, SATA expected). The drive is based on seven 1.43TB SMR platters and is filed with helium. Actual performance of the drive was not revealed, but do not expect it to be truly high since SMR platters cannot enable leading-edge performance. Keeping in mind that the HDD is designed for mostly for cold storage, its performance is not as important as its capacity. HGST/WD is currently sampling 10TB SMR HelioSeal HDD. Commercial shipments are not expected to start before calendar 2015.

In addition to announcing its new HDDs, HGST said that while its air-based HDD high-capacity platforms have served the industry for decades, to better serve the evolving data centre’s capacity and efficiency needs, all future HGST enterprise capacity HDDs will be built on the HelioSeal platform and will thus be filed with helium. Expect the future 3.5” enterprise capacity HDDs from HGST to feature six or seven platters as well as very high capacities.

hgst_wd_helium_hdd

“By providing complete solutions for both performance and capacity centric environments, we’re enabling our data center customers and partners to focus on developing new services and capabilities that drive competitive differentiation and profitability for their businesses,” said Mike Cordano, president of HGST.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It is really interesting to note that HGST plans to stop development of capacity-optimized enterprise-class hard disk drives. It is unclear whether Western Digital itself will do the same and will borrow the HelioSeal technology from HGST, or will continue with air-filed HDDs. If WD adopts the sealed-HDD technology, then we can talk about a new industry trend towards gas-filed capacity-optimized HDDs, which means that eventually the technology could be used for capacity-optimized consumer drives too. If not, it will mean that WD and HGST will simply offer their products to different kinds of customers. The latter will address clients with demands for maximum storage density, while the former will concentrate on those, who need certain other things.

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