HGST Ships 6TB Ultrastar He6 Helium-Filled Hard Disk Drive

HGST, a Western Digital company, has announced that it has started to ship the ultra-sized 6TB Ultrastar He6 hard disk drives (HDD): a 7 platter design that is filled (although not chilled) with Helium. The HGST Ultrastar He6 uses a patented 'HelioSeal' process to enable the world's highest capacity HDD, a low 5.3W idle power consumption (23% less) that runs 4-5°C cooler than comparative products. The drives are exclusively designed for "key OEMs, cloud and research leaders" as well as some of the world's largest social media and search companies including HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and Code42. HGST managed to qualify the new drive and bring the world's highest capacity HDD with lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) for these kinds of uses. Brendan Collins, Vice President of product marketing at HGST said: "With ever-increasing pressures on corporate and cloud data centers to improve storage efficiencies and reduce costs, HGST is at the forefront delivering a revolutionary new solution that significantly improves data center TCO on virtually every level - capacity, power, cooling and storage density - all in the same 3.5-inch form factor. Not only is our new Ultrastar helium hard drive helping customers solve data center challenges today, our mainstream helium platform will serve as the future building block for new products and technologies moving forward. This is a huge feat, and we are gratified by the support of our customers in the development of this platform."