Will the capacity be increased by helium filling in the HDD by 40%, structural change to the HDD industry arrived?

HGST of the major hard disk makers Western Digital Group has made a new product filled with helium gas in the HDD. Filling with helium reduces power consumption and increases capacity.

HGST Announces Radically New, Helium-Filled Hard Disk Drive Platform | 2012


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In the past fifty years, no special gas was enclosed inside the HDD. However, Western Digital will start a helium-filled HDD production line in the future.

It is hard to understand how "connecting helium" and "increasing capacity" are connected, but by filling helium it is possible to eliminate friction and resistance inside the HDD, so that more platter than present It will be built in and the capacity will increase.

This technology has been studied in the industry for the last ten years, and HGST 's patented technology is the key to efficiently producing HDDs without leaking helium, he said. President Brendan Collins says.

Originally the capacity of the HDD is determined by the number of internal platter, and the number of the platter is restricted by platter vibration. This is because the platter rotates thousands of times per minute to internally generate airflow, which will affect the platter itself and the readhead,TMR(Track misregistration) problem.

The capacity on the platters is determined by the number of tracks per inch (TPI), which was 100,000 TPI 10 years ago, but with the current technology it has reached 500,000 TPI and the limit to make the track read by the head It has reached. However, the helium-filled HDD did not generate internal airflow almost in the environment of 7200 rpm (revolutions per minute), and succeeded in overcoming the obstacle of TMR. IDC analyst John Rydning commented that manufacturers will be able to use thinner platter if TMR decreases.

The capacity of the HDD of 7 platter (5.6 TB) produced by HGST this time increased compared to the conventional 5 platter HDD (4 TB), while the weight was the same 690 g. It is lighter by 29% when compared per 1 TB. In addition, since the force required for rotation decreases by 23%, the power consumption during idling has dropped from 6.9 W to 5.3 W in the past. Compared to the price itself, the 3.5-inch helium-filled HDD will be cheaper by 50% at the GB unit price compared to the 2.5-inch HDD. By decreasing the resistance of the platter, the temperature is also lowered by 4 to 5 degrees, and it will operate even in more severe environments.

Helium-filled HDD targets are public cloud computing systems and corporate data centers. With helium-filled HDD, for example, if it is 1PB (petabytes) of data, 20 servers equipped with 4TB HDD are needed, but if you have a helium-filled HDD of 5.6TB, it will be OK with 14 servers , It will save space. In other words, if it is the same space, capacity can be increased.

Collins said, "This technology will be the foundation for cloud storage in the data center ten years ahead." "The structural transformation is now coming in."

John Rydning, an analyst, knows that this technology has been researched for a long time, nobody knows, how people respond when helium filled HDD actually comes out I am interested in that.

By the way, it will be put into practical use next year. I thought that the future storage will be from HDD to SSD, but it may not be the case.