We first came to know about the high storage HGST Hard disk drives in 2012, when the company announced that it could boost the storage capacity by forty percent. The principle behind this storage upgrade was that the old air filled inside these drives, if replaced by Helium would result in a much-enhanced storage capacity. The company stayed true to its word and subsequently released a six terabyte helium-based hard disk in 2013. Followed by an eight TB in 2014 and now it has come up with yet another 2TB upgrade with the Ultrastar He10.
But who would require such astronomical amounts of data? Enterprises and data centers are the prime stakeholders in this range as standard computing demands don’t require such monstrous disk space. The latest 10-GB drive is named Ultrastar Archive He10, and it in incorporates the same Helium gas in principle. Th Helium has special properties that make it such an improvement over the air. The density of the inert gas is around one-seventh of that of air. It resulted in lesser friction resulting in lower power requirements for the device and increased the data density of the disk drives too.
This revolutionary usage of Helium in hard drives is called HelioSeal and HGST has combined it with Shingled Magnetic Recoding (SMR) to record the data on overlapping tracks rather than parallel ones just like shingles of roofs. This cutting edge technology has led the company’s new disk drive to be the industry leader in storage size, low power requirements, and a reliable storage solution. But since the nature of the drive only allows it to write entire tracks, the mega drive is suited to archive duty rather than a conventional workstation’s storage unit.
The 3.5-inch drive is rated at 2 million hours in Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF). It comes in SATA 6Gbps and SAS Gbps hosting varieties. HGST also claims a twenty percent better power efficiency over its previous model. It will be available for cloud and OEM storage clients soon. HGST has been improving the data capabilities at an exponential rate. We hope to see more of this from HGST as it can only mean better servers and cloud computing options for us! But even if you had ten terabytes of storage, what would you do with it?