HGST, formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, in partnership with Western Digital, has launched a helium-filled 6TB hard drive.

After working closely with companies and organisations such as HP, Netflix, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and other large social media and search companies, Hitachi developed the ‘HelioSeal’ platform as a path for higher capacity storage.

Since the density of helium is one-seventh that of air, there is dramatically less drag force acting on the spinning disk stack so that mechanical power into the motor is reduced and also it means that the fluid flow forces buffeting the disks and the arms, which position the heads over the data tracks, are reduced allowing for disks to be placed closer together and to place data tracks closer together.

Hitachi also say that the lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction of helium also mean the drive will run cooler and will emit less acoustic noise.

The new Ultrastar He6 drive, as it is named, is aimed at use in cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments.

Leveraging these benefits of helium, the Ultrastar He6 drive features a 7Stac disk design with 6TB, making it a particularly high capacity HDD. The helium platform will serve as the main platform for new technologies like shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) where HGST will continue to push the HDD areal density envelope.

The new 6TB drive is 50g lighter than a standard 3.5 inch drive, has low power consumption – with 49 percent better watts-per-TB, and has a small footprint in a standard 3.5 inch form factor.

"With ever-increasing pressures on corporate and cloud data centers to improve storage efficiencies and reduce costs, HGST is at the forefront delivering a revolutionary new solution that significantly improves data center TCO on virtually every level – capacity, power, cooling and storage density – all in the same 3.5-inch form factor," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST.