Western Digital Ships More than 10 Million Helium-Filled HDDS

Oct 18, 2016 -

Helping the world harness the power of data, Western Digital Corporation today announced that it has shipped more than 10 million helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs) since the company first introduced the HelioSeal platform four years ago. First shipped in 2013, Western Digital’s HelioSeal platform has consistently pushed the envelope in terms of capacity and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits, becoming the highest density HDDs, best suited for massive scale-out workloads.

“Extreme capacity hard drives are increasingly a key value enabler for enterprise applications and Western Digital continues to be a technology and time-to-market leader in terms of delivering capacity-optimized enterprise HDDs,” said John Chen, vice president, TRENDFOCUS. “As cloud and traditional enterprise customers continue to develop applications that make use of all of their accessible data, high density drives will be a crucial component that enables cost-effective storage of that data at scale. Western Digital’s HelioSeal platform has proven to be a key differentiator that addresses high capacity needs.”



Underscoring the overall TCO benefits is the power efficiency of the HelioSeal platform. The 10 million helium hard drives, or approximately 76 exabytes (EB) of storage capacity, are a testament to energy efficiency at scale. As architects continue to design for hyperscale cloud applications, 76EB of data stored on 10TB helium-filled drives would save over 1 million kilowatt hours (KWh) of operating power each day, about half the power required for 8TB air-filled drives. The energy saved in one day of operation from these drives would be enough to power about 35,000 U.S. homes for the same day, illustrating how the efficiency of the HelioSeal line can help data center architects meet eco-environmental goals and requirements.

Western Digital offers the HelioSeal platform on its enterprise-class products (under its HGST product brand as Ultrastar® He10 and Ultrastar He8, and under its WD product brand as WD Gold), and its NAS and surveillance offerings (WD Red, WD Red Pro and WD Purple) in volume today. For more information on the HelioSeal platform, please visit: https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/HGST-Helium-Technology-BR03.pdf

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