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Posted by on in Technology News
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New Helium-filled, Largest Ever (5.6TB) Hard Drive

Hard_driveWD's HGST division (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) has revealed some startling details about what it claims is the largest hard drive to-date. While HGST has yet to provide all the details, stiorage experts predict that the 5.6TB drive will take the form of a standard 3.5" SATA drive.

For all the nitty-gritty, check out storagenewsletter.com's take, but here's a summary:

Because the drive's filled with helium--which has 1/7 the density of standard air--the drive's platters encounter much less drag as they spin, which means the drive's motor has substantially lower power needs (a big plus for data centers). While HGST hasn't addressed the drive's final performance specs yet, it's also possible that a low-drag helium environment could lead to a higher RPM drive.

But the main benefit of helium's low density is its reduction of the fluid flow forces (in essence, turbulence) on all of an operating drive's internal components. It's this substantial drop in shear forces and increase in thermal conduction that allows HGST to pack so many platters (seven) into a standard-sized 3.5" drive. (Current 4TB drives use only five platters.) The "smoother ride" provided by the helium environment also means the drive heads can be even more precisely callbrated, which lets the drive's write heads pack more bits into the same amount of platter space as a typical drive. 

 

Tagged in: hard drive storage
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Joseph Walker runs an IT consulting and computer repair business (and consults with other consultants, too). He's also been doing technical writing and IT industry reporting for the past five years in his spare time. He was a banker once upon a time in a city far away, but he didn't much like that. There's even more to his story, but biographer is sadly not one of the many hats he wears.
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Comments

  • Wednesday, 19 September 2012

    Yet another article that is identical to one I have read elsewhere.
    This guy seems to just plagiarise other peoples content, he is certainly so far never able to answer any questions about any of his topics.

  • Joseph Walker
    Joseph Walker Wednesday, 19 September 2012

    Russ, what questions do you have?

    Also, some of what I do is completely unique content. Part of my job is also finding interesting things on the web related to IT and technology and sharing them here. I linked to where I found the information. That's standard blogging practice.

  • Kyle
    Kyle Wednesday, 19 September 2012

    Wow Russ, why the hate? Did Joseph steal your seat at the last conference or something? This is so clearly not plagiarism it's not even funny. Dozens of sites covered this hard drive when WD did the press release. Joseph's article is the only one I've seen where he actually cites the source of his information. Maybe you didn't know this, but a lot of what sites like PCworld, Computerworld, VarGuy, etc. publish is just re-touched press releases. Where do you think they all get their information? A lot of newspapers don't even bother changing anything. They just publish the press release wholesale. If every single thing everyone wrote in journalism had to be independently sourced and completely unique, there'd be a whole lot less information out there for you to consume.

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