With more than one million helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs) deployed, HGST, a Western Digital company announced it has achieved a new milestone in reliability as the only manufacturer with drives field-proven and rated for two and a half (2.5) million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). Today’s news demonstrates that HGST’s helium HDDs are poised to become the mainstream choice for data center applications where storage density, reliability and power efficiency are paramount. Now shipping its second generation HelioSeal Platform drives, HGST is shifting its volume mix and ramping Helium production to meet strengthening customer demand across cloud and mainstream data center applications.
Path To True TCO
With strong market acceptance from the largest cloud service providers, Internet giants, OEMs and businesses around the world, including Netflix, Huawei, Inspur, HP, OVH, Starline, Buffalo, DataON, DDN and Racktop to name a few, theHGST HelioSeal Platform represents proven innovation in high-capacity HDD technology and reliability, while loweringtrue total cost of ownership (TCO). While there are a number of ways to increase hard drive capacity, HGST’s HelioSeal platform is the only technology to provide unmatched reliability and a long-term path for delivering higher capacity storage on a standard 3.5-inch HDD form factor, while lowering power and drive temperature at the same time. All this equates to best storage density, TB-per-system weight, TB/Sq. foot and lowest watt/TB for enterprise and cloud data centers.
Since introducing the technology in 2013, HGST has been steadily increasing volume production to enable an expanding set of customers to enjoy the proven benefits of its Helium-filled technology. Now in its second generation, HGST’s HelioSeal platform is gaining broader customer support and the company is increasing production of its Ultrastar® He8, 8TB drives – the highest capacity available in the market that delivers full performance for all capacity-optimized applications. HGST’s HelioSeal technology allows this to be accomplished at standard 7,200 RPM performance with low power while competitive air based products typically reduce RPM and performance to achieve lower power.
Both the Ultrastar® He8 and the Ultrastar He6 families now feature an unprecedented reliability rating of 2.5M hours MTBF. Due to its patented manufacturing process and the inherent benefits of Helium, HGST’s HelioSeal drives are field proven and have a more robust design margin than traditional air based drives. The HGST Helium drives are hermetically-sealed, which keep air, humidity and other contaminates out of the drive, allowing them to be used in harsh or ambient environments. The Helium inside the drives also reduces disk vibration and flutter, adding to even greater reliability.
“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. “With more than one million drives deployed, the rapid industry adoption of this revolutionary technology affirms our commitment to Helium as the foundation for all future scaling technologies. With a value-basedpricing strategy in place and manufacturing investments to promote the increased volumes, HGST is on an accelerated path to delivering higher capacities and better TCO into existing and future form factor designs.”
Qiu Long, President, Server Business, IT Product Line, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., said, “To support the customers’ rapid business growth as well as to efficiently scale, servers and massive data centers must optimize TCO to help manage capacity, power, cooling and storage density. We congratulate HGST on their one millionth helium hard drive deployment. HGST’s HelioSeal platform is an excellent innovation, delivering advanced technology to help meet the growing capacity and TCO needs in the data center.”
