Western Digital introduces helium gas is pumped hard drive to increase performance and capacity


Western Digital has announced that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST, Hitachi past, now belong to the Western Digital after the deal $ 4.3 billion) has introduced a world's first hard drive to use gas helium.


Inside the normal HDD, disc blades and other components will operate in the air, but for now it's running in a helium environment. Due to the density of only 1/7 compared with normal air gases can bring many benefits, such as reduced operating costs, increased hard drive capacity, reducing the amount of heat generated. HGST said the disk from rotating at high speed hard drive is influenced by many different types of resources that engineers have difficulty if you want to improve the performance of the device.

For example, by exposure to the air motor will require more power to operate. Because of high density airflow movement also negatively affect the read / write data and the blade itself makes placing the disk closer to the present is difficult. Expected to shrink the track (the "ring" data on disk blade) to increase the HDD capacity becomes more complicated. Cooling air that HDD is not as good as helium (which has better thermal conductivity), and hard drives generate more noise. Meanwhile, if using helium, the external force can be greatly reduced; accompanied by the above restrictions will no longer be a problem.

Specifically, according to HGST, the HDD power consumption is less than 23%. The company can also integrate up to 7 blades on the hard disk drive 3.5 "common, not just the current five (ie increased capacity.) Power consumption per TB of data is also reduced by 45%. With object used mainly companies providing cloud services or storage center data, the HDD Heli helps reduce total cost of ownership (Total Cost Of Ownership - TCO, including all financial expenditures related to hardware, software, human resources, installation, maintenance, etc. for a certain product or service) is very important to help businesses save a lot of money for upgrades, cooling, maintenance, power cost. So why is helium not used for this purpose? Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing of HGST, explained that there is no company may hold a shell of helium HDD enough not to leak and if they can not take this kind of HDD production in large number. HGST has revealed that it took 6 years to development of this technology. Expected HDD using helium will be deployed next year, and then we will know more about the size and configuration details of the type of storage.

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