Ultrastar He12 is 50 per cent bigger than the largest capacity air-drive in the same class
HGST committed several years ago to drives filled with helium (a process known as Helioseal), which enables faster speeds and higher capacities. This has been brought to bear with the Ultrastar He12 , a 12TB drive aimed at active random workloads, encompassing data centre needs for enterprise, cloud and hyper scale. “We have again raised the bar in enterprise storage with the industry’s most advanced and cost effective highest capacity helium HDD storage solutions,” said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. Helium drives have a micro-climate 1/7th the density of air, which means platters can be thinner and the read-arms have a lighter touch. As data centres struggle with the ever-growing plethora of data being generated, most of it machine-to-machine, maximising real-estate is one of the big challenges and higher capacity drives that don’t compromise performance are vital. The 12TB marker makes for a drive 50 per cent bigger than the largest capacity air-drive in the same class. It is also the first time an eighth disk has been added to the mix, and despite that, power demands remain efficient. “The Ultrastar He12 hard drive advances Western Digital’s portfolio leveraging the HelioSeal platform to deliver industry-leading high capacity HDD storage with exceptional power efficiency. “Western Digital has shipped over 15 million helium-based high capacity drives to date and continues to support our customers with outstanding reliability and quality of service (QoS). Our industry-leading data center portfolio enables customers across the spectrum to meet their evolving and dynamic data center demand.” The disk offers the world’s first eight-disk design, available as 12Gbps SAS or 6Gbps SATA, with instant security erasure, which makes it easy to wipe a disk securely and even redeploy it remotely. The drive is self-encypting and offers a reliability score of 2.5 million hours mean-time between failures (MTBF). In addition, WD also thrown in a five-year warranty. HGST/Western Digital helium drives work using perpendicular recording, which enables multiple layers of data on the same platter.
WESTERN DIGITAL has unveiled its latest helium drive under the HGST brand, a 12TB monster.