HGST Ships 6TB Ultrastar He6 Helium-Filled Hard Drives
HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced that it is shipping the 6TB Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD). Key OEM, cloud and research leaders working closely with HGST to qualify the drive include HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and Code42, as well as some of the world’s largest social media and search companies. Revealed in September 2012, HGST’s cutting-edge HelioSeal™ platform provides a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come while significantly lowering customer total cost of ownership (TCO). Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the new Ultrastar He6 drive features HGST’s innovative 7Stac™ disk design with 6TB, making it the world’s highest capacity HDD with the best TCO for cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments.

“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,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “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.”


CDRLabs has taken a long overdue look at OCZ's Vertex 450 solid state drive. Bridging the gap between high performance and mainstream solid-state storage, the ultra-slim Vertex 450 is based on OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M10 controller. Developed entirely in-house, this cutting-edge controller is powered by both an ARM Cortex processor and OCZ's own Aragon co-processor and features an advanced, multi-level ECC engine, low write amplification, efficient garbage collection, and adaptive NAND flash management. The Vertex 450 is also equipped with 20nm synchronous MLC NAND and an extra large DRAM cache to deliver up to 540MB/s read and 525MB/s write speeds along with a maximum of 90,000 4KB random write IOPS.