Two industry firsts for HGST, Inc. as the enterprise hardware maker revealed three new hard disk drive products at its recent Press & Industry Analysts Briefing in San Francisco, California. The CUBE’s Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick spoke to Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing for HGST, about the end of air-based drives and new helium technologies in the hard disk drive market. Two of the industry-first announcements involved both helium and shingled magnetic cording. The He8, a 3.5-inch helium platform enterprise hard drive, is a second-generation HelioSeal product. “This offers not just increased capacity, but low power and low cooling,” Collins said. “The benefit to the big cloud service providers is, not only can you increase capacity, but can reduce power and cooling and increase footprint all at the same time. If you are a cloud service provider you are trying to build this explosive growth in the data center, but you have a flat IT budget. This really helps them address that gap.” HGST also announced its 10 TB HDD for cloud and cold storage. HGST is currently sampling the new 10TB HDDs. “That is exciting just by the sheer size of it,” according to Collins. “What we get to do is leverage the 8 terabyte helium product and use shingled magnetic recording. The combination of both of those enables us to deliver 10 terabytes typically two to three years earlier than we normally would.”
Betting big on helium as air-based products phase out
HGST also revealed its 6TB 7K6000, the seventh generation air-based platform, enabling high-capacity performance (5TB and 6TB) in a standard 3.5-inch HDD design. This will be the last of the company’s air-based models and will ship for another two or three generations. “It is the last of the generation,” Collins said. “We have come to a point where we are putting all of our chips on the center table and betting big time on helium.”
The evolution of helium
The helium technology evolved a few years ago when HGST began engaging cloud server providers that revealed they needed a high capacity, low-cost, and reliable product. That is when the company reached into its bag of tricks and pulled out helium. “As a platform going forward, HelioSeal allows us to stay with the large three-and-a-half-inch form factor we have for probably another 10-plus years,” according to Collins.