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Disciple
Western Digital’s HGST subsidiary has announced the commercial availability of the world’s first hermetically sealed, helium-filled hard drive, the Ultrastar He6 — a 6-terabyte monster that, along with being the first helium-filled drive, just happens to be the highest-capacity hard drive in the world.
Currently, hard drives aren’t sealed — they have filters that prevent contaminants from getting in, but otherwise there’s normal air rushing around inside your computer’s hard drives. Air has the nasty habit of being dense, turbulent, and thanks to its oxygen content, corrosive. As you can probably imagine, these first two factors are a major problem when you have multiple hard drive platters rotating at thousands of RPM in a very enclosed space: The turbulence at the edge of the platter creates a bottleneck, requiring platters to be thick enough and strong enough to withstand the buffeting — and the density of air creates massive resistance, driving up energy consumption and limiting the max RPM.
Helium, however, is about seven times less dense than air. This creates less resistance and turbulence, in turn allowing for massive improvements to almost every aspect of a hard drive’s operation. With a helium atmosphere, you can have more platters, spin the platters faster, have denser tracks on the platters, and consume less power. For now, it seems like Western Digital/HGST has opted to increase the max number of platters (from five to seven) and reduce power consumption (23% lower idle power, 49% lower watts-per-terabyte). There’s no word on spindle speed, but it’s probably 7,200 RPM like the conventional, air-filled Ultrastar drives. The Ultrastar He6, in case you were wondering, is an enterprise-class drive — there’s no word on pricing, but the air-filled Ultrastar 7K4000 is $315 from Amazon, so it won’t be cheap.
The 6TB Ultrastar He6 is available from today. There’s no word on pricing, and it isn’t clear if this will be something that you can buy from Newegg, or if it’s purely for enterprise-level Big Iron. With helium prices on the rise (and and US government only narrowly avoiding the closure of the world’s only strategic reserve), we would expect the He6 and future helium-filled drives to be expensive, niche products. If you’re looking to build an awesome submerged water cooling rig, you want boat loads of storage capacity, and money’s no object, then today’s your lucky day.
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...he6-the-worlds-first-helium-filled-hard-drive
http://www.hgst.com/press-room/press-releases/hgst-ships-6TB-Ultrastar-HE6-helium-filled