Western Digital has announced that it has begun shipping its fourth-generation helium-based hard drive with its 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 hard drive. The Ultrastar He12 12TB hard drive is the next generation of the company’s award-winning high capacity enterprise-class drive with HelioSeal technology, providing customers with a data storage solution addressing the expansive information management needs and demanding performance requirements of today’s enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.
“We have again raised the bar in enterprise storage with the industry’s most advanced and cost effective highest capacity helium HDD storage solutions,” said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. “The Ultrastar He12 hard drive advances Western Digital’s portfolio leveraging the HelioSeal platform to deliver industry-leading high capacity HDD storage with exceptional power efficiency. Western Digital has shipped over 15M helium-based high capacity drives to date and continues to support our customers with outstanding reliability and Quality of Service (QoS). Our industry-leading data center portfolio enables customers across the spectrum to meet their evolving and dynamic data center demand.”
The enterprise-class Ultrastar He12 HDD features an industry-first eight-disk design, to deliver 12TB capacity using PMR technology in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. It is the world’s highest capacity hard disk drive for active random workloads. Utilizing Western Digital’s unique HelioSeal process that seals helium in the drive to help provide the highest capacity HDD and exceptional power efficiency, the Ultrastar He12 HDD comes in a single 12TB capacity point and offers either a SATA or SAS interface both using Advanced Format.
According to the company, the HelioSeal technology utilises helium with 1/7 the density of air, enabling the use of thinner disks, while maintaining a stable recording interface. The unique Ultrastar He12 HDD design adds an eighth disk, two more than the highest capacity air-based enterprise drive, which enabled the capacity increase to 12TB, 50 percent more than the highest air-based enterprise drive.
