Western Digital today announced that it has shipped more than 10 million helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs) since the company first introduced the HelioSeal platform four years ago. First shipped in 2013, Western Digital’s HelioSeal platform has consistently pushed the envelope in terms of capacity and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits, becoming the highest density HDDs, best suited for massive scale-out workloads.

With roots tracing back to the first hard drive manufactured 60 years ago, Western Digital continues to lead the industry by delivering innovative and reliable storage solutions that help solve challenges faced by customers in the datacenter. The HelioSeal technology complements future magnetic recording technologies, and will enable even higher density HDDs expressly designed for enterprise applications and hyperscale workloads that require capacity to capture vast amounts of operational and historical data. Helium-based drives are also well suited for applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), search and social media. Spanning three generations, the HelioSeal platform enables the highest density HDDs available today and delivers the highest HDD reliability ratings to reinforce its capabilities for use in cloud and enterprise workloads where availability and reliability are paramount concerns.

Underscoring the overall TCO benefits is the power efficiency of the HelioSeal platform. The 10 million helium hard drives, or approximately 76 exabytes (EB) of storage capacity, are a testament to energy efficiency at scale. As architects continue to design for hyperscale cloud applications, 76EB of data stored on 10TB helium-filled drives would save over 1 million kilowatt hours (KWh) of operating power each day, about half the power required for 8TB air-filled drives. The energy saved in one day of operation from these drives would be enough to power about 35,000 U.S. homes for the same day, illustrating how the efficiency of the HelioSeal line can help data center architects meet eco-environmental goals and requirements.

Western Digital offers the HelioSeal platform on its enterprise-class products (under its HGST product brand as Ultrastar^® He10and Ultrastar He8, and under its WD product brand as WD Gold), and its NAS and surveillance offerings (WD Red, WD Red Pro and WD Purple) in volume today.

For more information on the HelioSeal platform, please visit:https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/HGST-Helium-Technology-BR03.pdf