ultrastar | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:52:11 +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 | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 WD launches new 22TB Red Pro, Purple Pro and Gold series HDDs https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/matthew-wilson/wd-launches-new-22tb-red-pro-purple-pro-and-gold-series-hdds/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/matthew-wilson/wd-launches-new-22tb-red-pro-purple-pro-and-gold-series-hdds/#respond Wed, 20 Jul 2022 08:20:50 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=568577 WD has long been at the forefront of storage technology. This month, the company is expanding its offerings to include new WD Red, Gold Purple and Ultrastar 22TB HDDs to tackle the world's growing need for reliable storage.  Each of these new 22TB HDDs is loaded with industry-firsts, including new OptiNAND technology, a HelioSeal design …

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WD has long been at the forefront of storage technology. This month, the company is expanding its offerings to include new WD Red, Gold Purple and Ultrastar 22TB HDDs to tackle the world's growing need for reliable storage. 

Each of these new 22TB HDDs is loaded with industry-firsts, including new OptiNAND technology, a HelioSeal design to create denser drives, energy-assisted PMR and more to deliver the industry's highest areal density at 2.2TB per platter, paving the way for 22TB CMR HDDs.

All of these 22TB drives are intended for professional use cases rather than home use. For instance, the WD Red Pro 22TB HDD is aimed towards businesses that need to share data across the office, or provide access to data to employees working from home. These are NAS drives and support all major NAS systems with up to 24-bays, so there is plenty of scalability .

Meanwhile, the Purple Pro HDDs are primarily for video surveillance systems, offering reliable storage rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF. The WD Gold CMR is ideal for enterprise and data centre environments.

All new 22TB WD Gold, Red Pro and Purple Pro HDDs are now shipping. The Ultrastar 22TB and 26TB HDDs began shipping to WD's channel partners last month.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Mass capacity drives are becoming more necessary as data demands grow across the world for all kinds of industries. 

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WD launches all-new WD_Black, SanDisk and Ultrastar SSDs for 2022 https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/matthew-wilson/wd-launches-all-new-wd_black-sandisk-and-ultrastar-ssds-for-2022/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/matthew-wilson/wd-launches-all-new-wd_black-sandisk-and-ultrastar-ssds-for-2022/#respond Mon, 09 May 2022 16:00:46 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=559945 Ahead of Computex next month, today Western Digital is hosting its own ‘What's next' digital event, showcasing all-new SSDs and storage devices for 2022. The new line-up includes new WD_Black SSDs, new creator-oriented storage from San Disk and a new ultra-high capacity Ultrastar SSD aimed at enterprise and datacentres.  We'll start off with what most …

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Ahead of Computex next month, today Western Digital is hosting its own ‘What's next' digital event, showcasing all-new SSDs and storage devices for 2022. The new line-up includes new WD_Black SSDs, new creator-oriented storage from San Disk and a new ultra-high capacity Ultrastar SSD aimed at enterprise and datacentres. 

We'll start off with what most of you are here for – new WD_Black drives. First up, Western Digital is launching the SN850X PCIe 4 NVMe SSD, offering speeds of up to 7300 MB/s, in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacity. The SSD also supports Game Mode 2.0, which will increase performance in games, particularly when streaming or capturing footage on top of playing. Prices will start at $189.99 in the US once these SSDs start shipping in July.

Next up is the WD_Black P40 Game Drive SSD, the latest in a long range of console-oriented Game Drive products. The P40 features a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 interface, offering speeds of up to 2,000MB/s, which is very impressive for a portable SSD. The WD_Black P40 will be launching this summer, starting at $119.99 and available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities.

On the SanDisk side of things, WD has a new SanDisk Professional Pro-Blade modular SSD ecosystem on the way. Aimed at creators who need instant access to their media files, the Pro-Blade series includes portable SSDs and two SSD enclosures.

The two enclosures you have to choose from include the Pro-Blade Transport, which is designed to deliver fast speeds in a portably form factor, and the Pro-Blade Station, which is designed for desktop use. At the heart of each, you'll want to place up to four Pro-Blade SSD Mags, a versatile NVMe SSD designed to slot inside the enclosures and deliver up to 2000MB/s transfer speeds in the Transport enclosure, and even faster speeds in the desktop enclosure. The SSD mag will be available in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities, with prices starting at $179.99.

Finally, the last big announcement we are covering today is the new WD Ultrastar NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, available in capacities up to 15.36TB and using next-gen BiCS5 3D TLC NAND and a PCIe 4.0 interface. The SSD will be available in a 2.5-inch form factor for traditional infrastructure, as well as in the ruler E1.L form-factor.

All of WD's new SSD products will be available over the coming months. Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: What do you all think of WD's new line-up for 2022? Will you be looking to upgrade your PC's SSD this year? 

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Western Digital begins shipping world’s first 14TB helium-filled HDD https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/matthew-wilson/western-digital-begins-shipping-worlds-first-14tb-helium-filled-hdd/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/matthew-wilson/western-digital-begins-shipping-worlds-first-14tb-helium-filled-hdd/#respond Wed, 04 Oct 2017 16:38:02 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=349064 Way back at the start of 2017, Western Digital began showing off two new helium-filled high-capacity hard drives, one featuring 12TB of storage and another featuring 14TB. The 12TB Ultrastar drive managed to hit store shelves back in April and now, it seems WD’s 14TB version is also ready for prime time. The 14TB HGST …

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Way back at the start of 2017, Western Digital began showing off two new helium-filled high-capacity hard drives, one featuring 12TB of storage and another featuring 14TB. The 12TB Ultrastar drive managed to hit store shelves back in April and now, it seems WD’s 14TB version is also ready for prime time.

The 14TB HGST Ultrastar HE12 is now shipping. The drive features eight platters, speeds of 7200 RPM and comes available in SAS/SATA variants. Both the 12TB and 14TB drive feature 256MB of cache and an 8ms seek time for reads and an 8.6ms seek time for writes.

The key difference separating the 12TB and 14TB Ultrastar drives besides capacity is the data recording method. The 12TB version uses perpendicular magnetic recording, meanwhile the 14TB uses shingled magnetic recording. The latter can pack up to 25 percent more data on the same platter compared to a PMR drive and will pave the way for even higher capacities in the future.

Western Digital’s Ultrastar HS14 is now shipping to various OEMs. The drive is mainly geared towards enterprise users in need of more storage and efficiency. This particular model has 60 percent lower power usage per terabyte when compared to air-filled 8TB alternatives.

KitGuru Says: We first saw this drive announced in January, so it has taken quite some time to come to market. That said, it doesn’t look like consumers will be able to get their hands on one any time soon. Still, eventually this technology will trickle down.

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HGST formally introduces its 10TB hard disk drive https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-formally-introduces-its-10tb-hard-disk-drive/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-formally-introduces-its-10tb-hard-disk-drive/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2015 19:15:10 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=253607 HGST, a maker of hard disk drives that belongs to Western Digital, on Tuesday formally introduced the world’s first hard disk drive with 10TB capacity. The HDD was developed for active archive applications and is not designed to offer leading-edge performance. Moreover, to use it, owners of datacenters will need to optimize their software. The …

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HGST, a maker of hard disk drives that belongs to Western Digital, on Tuesday formally introduced the world’s first hard disk drive with 10TB capacity. The HDD was developed for active archive applications and is not designed to offer leading-edge performance. Moreover, to use it, owners of datacenters will need to optimize their software.

The HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 comes in 3.5” form-factor, is based on seven shingled magnetic recording (SMR) platters and is filled with helium. The new drive features Serial ATA-6Gb/s or SAS-6Gb/s interface as well as 7200rpm spindle speed. According to HGST, the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 has sustained read transfer rate of 157MB/s and sustained write transfer rate of 68MB/s. Average seek time of the drive is about 8.5ms. The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 is the third of HGST’s helium-based HDDs launched in less than two years.

“HGST’s helium-filled drives boasts industry-leading storage density, low power consumption and proven reliability with 2.5M hours MTBF,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing of HGST. “By layering SMR on top of helium, we are enabling massively-scalable, TCO-driven storage solutions with the performance and durability necessary for the long term retention of archived data. Making SMR design investments today minimizes incremental efforts for future SMR solutions, and gives our customers a time-to-market advantage for all current and future high capacity HDDs in the market.”

hgst_10tb_hdd

HGST’s 10TB hard disk drives are designed for cloud datacenters that require maximum amount of storage. Since applications based on the new Ultrastar Archive Ha10 maximize storage density per cubic meter, the new hard drives will be popular among companies like Amazon Web Services and similar.

In fact, HGST warns that the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 is not a drop-in replacement for traditional capacity enterprise drives. To truly take advantage of the HDD, custom active archive applications with sequential write workloads are required. Since the drives use SMR platters, owners of datacenters will need to optimize their software for the HDD. Initial rollout of the 10TB hard drive is focused on cloud and OEM storage customers who have the in-house capability to develop the software required. As a result, at first such drives will be available at a request and will not be sold in retail.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Without any doubts, 10TB hard disk drive is a breakthrough. However, to truly take advantage of increased capacities, datacentre owners will have to optimize their software since HDDs based on SMR technology are considerably slower than hard drives featuring PMR platters.

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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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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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HGST: Mass production of 10TB HDDs to start in Q1 2015 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-mass-production-of-10tb-hdds-to-start-in-q1-2015/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-mass-production-of-10tb-hdds-to-start-in-q1-2015/#comments Thu, 25 Sep 2014 22:59:28 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=213604 Although HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., introduced its 10TB hard disk drive earlier this month, the company has never revealed when it plans to release the product commercially. This week a representative for HGST finally said that the company will start mass production of behemoth HDD in early 2015. Vincent Chen, the general manager …

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Although HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., introduced its 10TB hard disk drive earlier this month, the company has never revealed when it plans to release the product commercially. This week a representative for HGST finally said that the company will start mass production of behemoth HDD in early 2015.

Vincent Chen, the general manager of HGST Taiwan and Shanghai revealed at a press conference on Thursday that mass production of HGST’s rather unique 10TB hard drive is set to start in the first quarter of 2015, reports DigiTimes web-site. Commercial shipments of such HDDs will likely start in Q1 2015 or Q2 2015, depending on when exactly mass production begins.

HGST’s Ultrastar 10TB SMR HelioSeal hard disk drive combines a number of leading-edge technologies. The drive is based on seven 1.43TB SMR [shingled magnetic recording] platters and is filed with helium. Nothing more, including spindle speed, performance figures, etc. is known about the novelty.

wd_hgst_ultrastar_helium_10tb

The 10TB HDD is 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. In many cases performance of cold storage applications does not matter a lot since most of the data hosted by such devices is never accessed.

Typical 42U capacity-optimized storage cluster can hold 360 3.5” hard disk drives. With 4TB drives such cluster can store up to 1440TB of data. With 10TB drives, its capacity will total 3600TB of data.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will be interesting to see what Seagate Technology will offer by Q1 2015. While the company has not announced any plans regarding sealed HDDs, it still could use SMR platters for hard drives designed for cold-storage applications.

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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.

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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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HGST unveils new-generation enterprise-grade SAS-12Gb/s SSDs https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-unveils-new-generation-enterprise-grade-sas-12gbs-ssds/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/ssd-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-unveils-new-generation-enterprise-grade-sas-12gbs-ssds/#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2014 22:01:47 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=205152 HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Monday unveiled its new enterprise-class solid-state drives with Serial Attached SCSI-12Gb/s interface. The new drives boast with up to 1.6TB capacity and up to 1.1GB/s read throughput, which puts them among the fastest and most reliable SSDs on the market today. The new family of SSDs with SAS-12Gb/s interface …

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HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Monday unveiled its new enterprise-class solid-state drives with Serial Attached SCSI-12Gb/s interface. The new drives boast with up to 1.6TB capacity and up to 1.1GB/s read throughput, which puts them among the fastest and most reliable SSDs on the market today.

The new family of SSDs with SAS-12Gb/s interface consists of three base models – Ultrastar SSD800MH.B (designed for extremely write-intensive applications and capable of 25 full random drive writes per day [DW/D] for five years), Ultrastar SSD1600MM (developed for write-intensive applications and capable of 10DW/D for five years) and Ultrastar SSD1600MR (designed for read-intensive applications) – all based on proprietary controllers developed by Intel Corp. and HGST as well as on enterprise-grade high-endurance multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory made by Intel using 20nm process technology.

hgst_wd_ssd_ultrastar_sas

The new family of solid-state drives was designed for applications requiring fast and reliable data storage, such as online transaction processing, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics. Select models support such security technologies as instant secure erase (ISE), self-encryption and so on.

hgst_wd_ssd_ultrastar_sas_specs

“HGST leads the industry in SAS SSDs, which continue to be the preferred storage building blocks for a large variety of server and storage systems that support a growing set of data-intensive enterprise applications,” said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing, HGST. “As our OEM, cloud and enterprise customers implement solutions to meet a variety of storage needs, SSDs and HDDs will increasingly be deployed in tiered pools of storage based on respective TCO strengths. HGST is in a unique position of offering a complete enterprise storage portfolio with leading solutions in both product categories.”

The new HGST Ultrastar SSD800MH.B, Ultrastar SSD1600MM and Ultrastar SSD1600MR SAS SSDs are currently completing qualifications at several server and storage system OEMs, and are generally available now. Pricing of such drives varies by customer and exact configuration.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will be almost impossible to obtain an Ultrastar SSD on the consumer market, unfortunately. What these new SSDs show are not only performance levels of the future drives aimed at more mainstream applications, but also levels of reliability possible with advanced MLC NAND flash memory.

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WD’s HGST debuts world’s first 1.8TB 10K HDD https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wds-hgst-debuts-worlds-first-1-8tb-10k-hdd/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wds-hgst-debuts-worlds-first-1-8tb-10k-hdd/#respond Thu, 10 Jul 2014 22:59:24 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=202553 HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of rapid speed and requiring 24/7 …

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HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of rapid speed and requiring 24/7 availability.

Based on HGST’s field proven 2.5” small form-factor high-quality design, the 2.5” enterprise-class Ultrastar C10K1800 combines high capacity with a significant improvement in both random write and sequential performance for mission-critical storage applications requiring 24/7 availability, according to the manufacturer.

HGST Ultrastar C10K1800 hard drives available in 300GB, 450GB, 600GB, 900GB, 1.2TB and 1.8TB capacities are powered by the latest-generation enterprise-class 2.5” platters with 580Gb/sq.in or 620Gb/sq.in areal density (the drives integrate from one to four platters). The new drives feature 10520 rpm spindle speed, 128MB cache buffer, 2.85ms average latency, 3.3 – 4.4ms seek time as well as sustained transfer rates from media to host between 129MB/s and 247MB/s (depending on the capacity, sector size, physical location of data on media and other factors). The drives consume up to 5.7W – 7.4W of power depending on the model.

The Ultrastar C10K1800-series hard disk drives feature HGST’s media cache architecture – a disk-based caching technology, which provides a large non-volatile cache on the media resulting in improved reliability and data integrity during unexpected power loss, as well as a significant improvement in write performance even at high workloads when compared to solutions with limited NAND or flash-based NVC.

wd_hgst_ultrastar_10k_artwork_enterprise_server_hdd

According to the manufacturer, as the demand for enterprise-class storage grows, customers are deploying tiered storage infrastructures built along a range of raw IOPS performance, capacity and $/GB price efficiencies. While solid state drives (SSDs) and 15K HDDs are designed for maximum performance, the demand for 10K HDDs remains to be strong as customers seek better $/GB metrics.

“Our customers continue to contend with explosive data growth, balancing disparate application loads, while needing to improve data center space and power efficiencies,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “By fusing unmatched capacity with ultimate performance in the same drive, the Ultrastar C10K1800 offers the optimal balance of capacity, performance and cost. We expect our customers to use the Ultrastar C10K1800 with a complement of SSDs and 15K performance HDDs in tiered pools of storage.”

The Ultrastar C10K1800 hard drive family is now shipping, and is being qualified by select OEMs. The FIPS certified models will be available in January 2015. The drives come with two million hours MTBF rating and five-year warranty.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While solid-stat drives are gaining market share, the demands for storage are growing so rapidly that there is plenty of need for fast hard disk drives as well, especially in tiered storage environments.

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HGST introduces 15K HDD with SAS-12Gb/s interface https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-introduces-15k-hdd-with-sas-12gbs-interface/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/hgst-introduces-15k-hdd-with-sas-12gbs-interface/#respond Wed, 26 Feb 2014 23:33:09 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=179397 HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Wednesday introduced one of the world’s highest-performing hard disk drive (HDD). The new Ultrastar enterprise-class storage solution boasts with 15K revolutions per minute spindle speed as well as Serial Attached SCSI 12Gb/s interface. HGST Ultrastar C15K600 hard disk drives are available in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB …

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HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., on Wednesday introduced one of the world’s highest-performing hard disk drive (HDD). The new Ultrastar enterprise-class storage solution boasts with 15K revolutions per minute spindle speed as well as Serial Attached SCSI 12Gb/s interface.

HGST Ultrastar C15K600 hard disk drives are available in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB capacities and are based on two or three platters. The drives feature 15K rpm spindle speed, 128MB cache, SAS-12Gb/s interface. Operating power consumption of the HDDs is 7W (a 55 per cent improvement over 3.5” 15K HDDs), active idle power consumption varies from 5W to 5.8W (a 54 per cent improvement over 3.5” 15K HDDs). The Ultrastar C15K600 family will be offered in 512e, 512n and 4K advanced format.

The Ultrastar C15K600 hard drives are designed enterprise workloads like on-line transaction processing and intensive data analytics. To achieve its extreme performance, the C15K600 utilizes several technologies, including HGST’s media caching technology, which provides a large caching mechanism for incoming data resulting in significantly enhanced write performance over solutions with limited NAND or flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC). The result is two times better random write performance than current generation 2.5” 15K drives, and two and a half times better performance than 3.5” 15K drives, according to HGST. At present, the C15K600 is the only 2.5” hard drive to utilize SAS-12Gb/s interface.

hgst_wd_ultrastar_c15k600

Although solid-state drives are rapidly gaining share of the market of high-performance storage, hard disk drives are still needed by many. Based on IDC industry data and customer feedback, HGST is seeing that by 2016, the performance enterprise (15K and 10K) HDD total available market (TAM) will be more than two times the unit size of the enterprise SSD TAM.

“A couple of factors are keeping the demand strong for 15K HDDs,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST. “First, our customers continue to use 15K HDDs along with a complement of SSDs in tiered pools of storage, depending on their performance, capacity, and power efficiency requirements. Our new Ultrastar C15K600 fills a need for storage that is more cost effective than SSDs, and has the performance, reliability and capacity requirements needed by mission-critical enterprise applications. Also, we see that the industry is transitioning away from 15K 3.5” hard drives to smaller 2.5” drives to help reduce space requirements, while offering comparable capacities to the legacy 3.5”15K products.”

Backed by field-proven technologies and HGST’s quality commitment, the new Ultrastar C15K600 family delivers leading enterprise-class specifications such as 2M hours MTBF, an annualize failure rate (AFR) of 0.44 per cent and comes with a five-year limited warranty.

The 512n and 4Kn versions of the Ultrastar C15K600 hard drive family are now shipping, and are being qualified by select OEMs. The 512e version will be available this summer.

KitGuru Says: The Ultrastar C15K600 may be the last generation of 15K 2.5” hard drives. At present it offers price advantage over comparable enterprise-class solid-state drives. In three years’ time, that advantage will diminish and very few customers will need such high-end HDDs at the cost of better performing SSDs.

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Helium-filled WD/HGST HDD with 6TB capacity available now https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/helium-filled-wdhgst-hdd-with-6tb-capacity-available-now/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/helium-filled-wdhgst-hdd-with-6tb-capacity-available-now/#comments Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:26:38 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=175252 HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has quietly started to sell its high-capacity Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD) with 6TB of storage space to end-users. Previously, such drives were available only to enterprise customers as well as storage device manufacturers. Unfortunately, the price of the helium-filled HDD is prohibitively high. Formally unveiled …

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HGST, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has quietly started to sell its high-capacity Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD) with 6TB of storage space to end-users. Previously, such drives were available only to enterprise customers as well as storage device manufacturers. Unfortunately, the price of the helium-filled HDD is prohibitively high.

Formally unveiled in November, 2013, the HGST Ultrastar He6 drive features seven platters that provide 6TB capacity. The hard disk drive sports 7200rpm spindle speed, 64MB cache and uses Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface. The Ultrastar He6 is based on an enterprise-class HDD platform designed for tough RAID and storage system environments, hence, should be more rugged than traditional desktop-class hard drives.

The Ultrastar He6 drives are filled with helium in a bid to pack up to seven platters into an industry-standard 3.5” form-factor. The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, which results into dramatically lower drag force acting on the spinning disk stack and substantial reduction of fluid flow forces buffeting the disks and the arms (which position the heads over the data tracks). This allows to decrease mechanical power of the motors (thus, cutting power consumption) and to place platters closer together (and install up to seven discs). The lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction of helium also mean the drive will run cooler and will emit less acoustic noise.

wd_hgst_hdd_multiplatter

HGST’s Ultrastar He6 is primarily designed for cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments, where the price of the hardware is not really critical, but total cost of ownership matters a lot.

At present, Amazon.com offers HGST Ultrastar He6 6TB HDD for $798. By contrast, two 3TB hard drives with 7200rpm spindle speed cost around $200; whereas two Seagate Enterprise 4TB (former Constellation ES) drives with 7200rpm motor, 128GB cache and Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface cost about $600.

KitGuru Says: What remains unclear is whether helium-filled hard drives are extremely expensive to manufacture, a reseller wants to earn some easy cash by offering an exclusive product, or WD/HGST itself want a huge price premium since there are no competing 6TB HDDs on the market today.

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Hitachi ship worlds first enterprise class 3TB Sata Drive https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/carl/hitachi-ship-worlds-first-enterprise-class-3tb-sata-drive/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/carl/hitachi-ship-worlds-first-enterprise-class-3tb-sata-drive/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:22:00 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=30873 Hitachi are shipping the worlds first enterprise class 3TB hard drive. The Ultrastar 7k3000 is a 7,200rpm drive that is supplied with either 6 Gbit/sec. serial SCSI or SATA interfaces. The 3.5 inch 7K3000 replaces the A7K2000 and has 5 platters. It increases areal density however on those disks by 50%, from 400GB to 600GB. …

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Hitachi are shipping the worlds first enterprise class 3TB hard drive. The Ultrastar 7k3000 is a 7,200rpm drive that is supplied with either 6 Gbit/sec. serial SCSI or SATA interfaces.

The 3.5 inch 7K3000 replaces the A7K2000 and has 5 platters. It increases areal density however on those disks by 50%, from 400GB to 600GB. The guaranteed meantime between failure is 2 million hours and the SAS version is dual ported for added resiliency.

Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST said “Serial ATA drives typically have 1.2 million hour MTBFs. And typically, high-performance drives have higher reliability, but they also have a higher price. In looking at quality reports from our customers … we realized we were blowing away our own [specifications]. In the field we were meeting 2 million to 3 million MTBF.”

“The ability to guarantee 40% more usable life than drives that have 1.2 million MTBF ratings means data centers can reduce their overall total cost of ownership for servers and arrays using the hardware.” he continued.

The hard drive also requires 32% less wattage to power per gigabyte of capacity when compared with the previous model and it comes with native data encryption. They are also offering a 2TB version of the drive and both will be available mid 2011.

KitGuru says: Should be a big seller in business circles.

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