By Darren Allan
Western Digital has announced that it’s now shipping the HGST-branded Ultrastar He12, a helium-based (‘HelioSeal’) 12TB hard disk.
This is a fourth-generation 3.5-inch helium hard drive which is built using PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology and made for supreme reliability, which isn’t surprising seeing as it’s aimed at the enterprise arena – but it gives us a good flavour of what’s coming to the consumer world, too.
The disk boasts an impressive rated MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2.5 million hours.
Western Digital claims that it’s the world’s first 8-platter design, and compared to the 7-platter previous generation, it can cram in 20% more capacity – hence reaching 12TB versus its 10TB predecessor.
It’s also very frugal with power requirements, with the company claiming that the wattage used per terabyte when idling is 54% lower than an 8TB air-filled drive.
SAS or SATA
It’s also worth noting that the Ultrastar He12 is available with either a SATA (6Gb/s) or SAS (12Gb/s) interface, and is a self-encrypting drive that also benefits from an ‘instant secure erase’ feature for fully wiping out data before redeploying the disk.
As for the core specs, the He12 is a 7200rpm hard drive with an average latency of 4.16ms and it’s capable …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components
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