HGST starts shipping high-density 6TB Ultrastar He6 HDD

Western Digital-owned HGST has announced that it has started shipping its newest HDD, dubbed the Ultrastar He6. The interesting thing about this HDD is that it has a whopping 6TB capacity, and the company is showcasing it to be one of its key new products to show off its high-density memory technology. The HDD uses HGST’s own HelioSeal platform to get its high-density storage, which also manages to reduce the total cost of ownership for users.

The Ultrastar He6 features the company’s 7Stac design, which ends up making it one of the world’s highest capacity HDDs, especially for cloud storage and massive scale-out environments. Sadly enough, it doesn’t seem to be available for consumers just yet, and is primarily aimed towards enterprises. The Ultrastar He6 drive is one of the first hermetically sealed helium-filled HDDs in the industry that manages to be cost-effective when manufactured in high volumes.

The Ultrastar He6 has a new 7-stack design

HGST claims that the Ultrastar He6 can manage 23 percent lower idle power per drive when compared to other HDDs, as well as a 49 percent improvement in watts-per-TB consumption. The company also claims that the HDD has a 50 percent higher density than other drives, while keeping the Ultrastar He6 50g lighter than others, leading to a 38 percent lower weight-per-TB ratio.

We hope that technology as impressive as this manages to make its way to the consumer market soon, especially considering that the market is currently stagnating towards 2TB HDDs along with relatively low-capacity SSDs. Hopefully, by the time this does become available to the average user, the price of manufacturing, and by extension, the price of the product itself will have become considerably lower.