Items tagged with HGST
At this point, it's hard to tell what the top limit for densities will be with current mechanical hard drive technologies, but HGST proves that it's not 12TB. With the company's brand-new Ultrastar He12, enterprise users can take advantage of a staggering 12,000GB capacity in a single hard disk drive, and relish in the fact that it's backed by a 5-year warranty. One of the standout features of the He12 is one that's not easy to see just by looking at it. Under the hood is are an industry-leading eight platters, with simple math telling us that each one is 1.5TB in size. The areal density on these disk is massive, and could mean that this could become one of the fastest 7,200 RPM drives ever produced....
Read more...
Enterprise clients are benefiting from an end-of-year rush by storage makers to push out next-generation solid state drive and hard disk drive solutions. We saw it at the beginning of the week when Micron unveiled an 8TB SSD, and not to be outdone, Western Digital today announced the expansion of its data center SSD and HDD lineup, among them an 8TB SSD of its own. Actually, it's labeled as 7.68TB, but why quibble over data measurements? In any event, that's the top capacity option in WD's HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 series PCIe-based SSD line (there are several other capacity options available starting at 800GB). It's available in choice of half-height, half-length and 2.5-inch form factors....
Read more...
Cloud storage company Backblaze is at it again with its latest report on failure rates for hard drives. Backblaze’s early 2015 study showed alarmingly high Seagate 3TB failure rates. For the first quarter of 2016, the overall failure rate for Seagate drives has fallen to a somewhat more respectable level, but Western Digital HDDs haven’t improved nearly as much overall. HDDs are still one of the most cost-effective ways to store large quantities of data, and Backblaze’s analysis is quite thorough and of great use for enthusiasts as the company almost exclusively uses consumer-grade 3.5-inch HDDs. When it comes to hours in service, over 51 percent of Backblaze’s HDD fleet is serviced by HGST drives,...
Read more...
Solid state drives (SSDs) might get all the press these days, but hard disk drives (HDDs) aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. They still offer a clear advantage when it comes to price-per-gigabyte and are great for archival purposes. With this in mind, Western Digital (HGST) is looking to shatter storage records by finally shipping its massive 10TB HDD that should be capable of handling all of your photos, ripped movies and system backups (among other things). HGST says that the 3.5-inch Ultrastar He10 is the world’s first shipping 10TB HDD featuring conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). HGST passed on using shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which is better suited for archival...
Read more...
We've come a long way since the days when hard drives were measured in megabytes. Underscoring that point is the industry's first 10TB enterprise-class HDD, the host-managed Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR built by HGST, a division of Western Digital. HGST says the capacious HDD is intended of next-generation archive applications. The 10TB monster is a helium-based drive, the third of its kind by HGST in the past two years. HGST says it's deployed over a million helium-based HelioSeal HDDs to date and is super confident in the technology's reliability. In the task the new drive was purpose built for -- active archive duties -- HGST says the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 is the market leader in reliability...
Read more...
When solid-state drives are unencumbered by the SATA interface, beautiful things can happen. Look no further than the Intel SSD 750 Series, which we reviewed two weeks ago, to see what kind of performance is achievable with an NVMe PCI Express interface. If you can actually believe it, HGST, a Western Digital company, has actually announced a new NVMe PCI Express SSD that is rated faster than even Intel’s new barnstormer. But to be fair, the Intel SSD 750 Series is aimed at the consumer/prosumer market whereas the new HGST Ultrastar SN100 is aimed squarely at the enterprise market. The HGST Ultrastar SN100 Series will be offered in both HH-HL and SFF 2.5-inch form-factors in capacities up to...
Read more...
Western Digital's participation in the SSD market has been spotty at best. Nearly five-years-ago, the company produced a line of desktop SSDs - like so many other I/O vendors - but today, you'll only find a small hint of flash in a WD drive if you look to the hybrid Black2. WD has instead used its subsidiary HGST to handle everything SSD, but with its major enterprise focus, no one would fault you if you were unaware that WD even dealt with SSDs at all. Well, the enterprise is one area WD seems pretty content to stay in, and expand. Today, the company announced its acquisition of Skyera, a well-known player in the enterprise SSD game with its collection...
Read more...
One day, we'll think back on the concept of a 8TB hard drive and scoff at how puny it sounds. But that day is not today. Today, shipping a 8TB hard drive is an impressive feat, and it is one that has been accomplished by HGST. The storage outfit has just commenced shipments of its 8TB and 6TB HelioSeal platform HDDs, with a path already defined to get these to 10TB very soon. The announcement came as a part of five other introductions, including the release of HGST Virident Space, which allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver one or more shared volumes of high performance Flash storage with a total usable capacity of more than 38TB. There's also its NVMe-compliant...
Read more...
While the rest of use have been enjoying what's left of the summer months, Western Digital's HGST division has been busy with some fancy new storage technologies. In two separate announcements today, HGST rolled out its new FlashMAX III family of PCIe accelerators and demonstrated a new SSD architecture that's capable of delivering 3 million IOPS. Starting with the latter, HGST built a full-length PCIe Gen 2x4 SSD card prototype equipped with 45nm 1Gb Phase Change Memory (PCM) chips. To reach 3 million IOPS, HGST needed to switch to PCM, which is a new class of high-density, non-volatile memory capable of delivering dramatically faster read access times compared to NAND flash memory. "The PCM...
Read more...
In the data center, every little bit that saves on cooling or power consumption helps, and to that end Western Digital’s HGST brand is shipping a new hard drive that’s designed for higher-capacity storage, higher storage density, lower power consumption, and lower cooling requirements. The HGST 6TB Ultrastar He6 features the company’s 7Stac disk design, claiming 50% higher capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor over competitive 5-platter, 4TB drives. As we first wrote about last year, though, the premier feature of the new HGST platform is that it’s filled with helium (helium!). The Ultrastar He6 is hermetically sealed with HGST’s HelioSeal process and filled...
Read more...
HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital) claims that its latest mobile hard drive, the Travelstar 5K1500, offers the--and we quote--“highest storage density of any hard disk drive today”. Those are strong words, but HGST may have something there. They crammed 1.5TB into a 2.5-inch, 9.5mm chassis that houses three platters. The drives also feature 32MB cache and a 6Gbps SATA interface with 5400 RPM speed. At idle, the Travelstar 5K1500 consumes just 0.5W of power and emits 2.5 bels, making it both power efficient and very quiet--both of which are features that mobile system makers cherish. Further, to protect against the...
Read more...
HGST, the company formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, became a Western Digital company some time ago. And now, that entity is introducing the industry's highest capacity 10K RPM HDD. It's an enterprise-class drive, with the Ultrastar C10K1200 providing a capacity extension to HGST’s Ultrastar C10K900 product line. It's a 2.5" unit, featuring a SAS 6Gb/s interface, a 64MB cache buffer for optimized read/write response time, and a fast 10K rotational speed. The company claims that there's no other drive in the market place similar to this, offering a 2 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF) specification that should give IT admins some peace of mind. For space and/or...
Read more...
You may have heard of liquid nitrogen being used in computer cases, mostly for cooling and bragging, but what about helium? Not so much. However, Hitachi GST (HGST) has just introduced a new platform of helium-filled hard drives. The company states that these offer greater capacity and significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for corporate and cloud data-centers. But what of the helium itself? Well, the density of helium is one-seventh that of air. This lower density means dramatically less drag force acting on the spinning disk stack so that mechanical power into the motor is substantially reduced. The lower helium density also means that the fluid flow forces buffeting the disks and...
Read more...
It seems like only yesterday (actually, it was less than a month ago) that Western Digital acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and made it a full subsidiary. The new management should be pleased with HGST’s announcement today of the 4TB enterprise-class Ultrastar 7K4000 hard drives. Optimized for space, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family is designed to offer low-power but high-performance drives for the cloud and big data markets where reducing space, power, and costs are paramount. The 7200RPM drives purportedly offer 33% more density with 24% lower watts per GB than HGST’s own previous-generation 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 drives. Other features include Advanced Format (with the newer...
Read more...
