Helium Filled 6TB Hard Drives Coming From Seagate

Helium Filled 6TB Hard Drives Coming From Seagate in Early Q2. In a world full of storage solutions its really hard to find something new and exciting, but last November Western Digital did just that being first to market with a Helium Filled 6TG Hard Drive that breaks into new territory for moving-parts technology, and is also the highest capacity available for now. Seagate however has a wide hair in their hat and has now decided to join the ranks of the Helium Filled 6TB market this coming April. I give a salute and hats off however to WD for being first to market with this new product.

The following statement is from Seagate spokesman Steve Luczo, chairman and chief executive of Seagate corporation:  “We are continuing to expand our offering of high capacity drives with our six-disk, 6 TB drive shipping early next quarter,” but beyond that Seagate has been rather quiet. We know that the new Helium Filled 6TB drives will be targeted at the “Enterprise” market, which also means they will be costly. I guess the biggest question is how they will go about this from a technological standpoint as they cannot just carbon copy the technology from Western Digital. WD had to fit multiple platters into a standard 3.5 form factor to achieve this solution, and maybe they will emulate this, but maybe something different will happen.

Western Digital reports that their Helium Filled 6TB hard drives provide 23 percent lower idle power and 49 percent better watts-per-TB. The helium-based drive also has the best density footprint in a standard 3.5-inch form factor, providing 50 percent higher capacity. The drive is also lighter in weight when compared to a standard 3.5-inch drive with 5 platters (38 percent lower weight-per-TB). This is great news to those looking for the ultimate in storage capacity, but do not have the finance for some over the top expensive SSD solution if even one can be had. Hopefully this technology will trickle down to the consumer level at some time frame, and then the common man might be able to afford one for his/her ultimate gaming system. Helium Filled drives offer a new level of performance and also run much cooler than standard HDD solutions.

Helium-Filled drives are able to run and perform better due to the Helium inside them, which changes the dynamic of how the drive works all around. Since Helium has a density that is one-tenth of air there is less drag force on the stacked spinning platters that also then reduces the power used by the motor. The platters and data tracks themselves can also be mounted closer together due to the use of Helium, which allows the fluid flow forces buffeting the platters and arms to be reduced. At least you can say this: It sure is not your usual hard drive suspect and at least offers something new to a someone flat market and that is always a great thing for everyone bottom to top. Depending on the price a nice Helium-Filled hard drive at 6TB would be an awesome addition to just about any media hungry computer user out there as the storage space is just awesome. Thanks for reading Tech Of Tomorrow my friends. Are you looking forward to this new 6TB craze, or will you just wait it out until the prices drop.

Source: Toms Hardware