Author: Jeremiah Tussey

Drive vendors continue to innovate, and one interesting new concept is the Helium hard disc drive, announced by HGST, a Western Digital Company. The important thing to note about Helium drive technology is that the drives are filled with Helium, allowing denser and more efficient drive designs. Helium is much lighter than air, so it imposes less drag on spinning disks, allowing disk platters to be stacked closer together. For enterprise applications, this allows more capacity without adding a more complex implementation via Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). This provides an advantage of increased capacity that can be added into an enterprise ecosystem without any extra work or driver support. Additionally, this advancement will lead to even more capacity with the upcoming integration of SMR.

From an interface point of view, there is really no difference in communicating with Helium drives, but with an added platter, our standard testing process ensures everything works as expected. The drive models in this case are the HGST Ultrastar He6 and He8, and this new HDD family has been tried and tested, and determined to be qualified with PMC products.

In fact, The SSD Review recently published a detailed performance analysis of the HGST Ultrastar He8 HDD in an 8x8TB configuration using a PMC Adaptec 8805 RAID Adapter. Here’s just a snapshot of what reviewer Sean Webster had to say:

“The Ultrastar He8 was able to deliver 175 IOPS during 4K and 8K reads and almost 300 IOPS in writes. Sequential reads and writes were also very good reaching 209MB/s each. Once thrown into a RAID array our numbers sky rocketed, especially in RAID 0, reaching 1,575MB/s read and 1,595MB/s write. That is nearly perfect scaling! We have to give kudos to not only these fantastic HDDs, but the Adaptec 8805 RAID card as well for that type of performance.”

The HGST Ultrastar He6 and He8 also improve the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for enterprise systems and hyperscale cloud data centers by combining these new levels of storage capacity with even lower power consumption. With the non-stop data growth driven by the 3rd platform era (Mobile, Social, Big Data, and Cloud), these platforms can lower their overall storage infrastructure costs by implementing Helium drives.

Through PMC’s Adaptec compatibility testing process, such infrastructure upgrades can be assured to go smoothly. To learn more about the Adaptec product Compatibility testing with products like the Adaptec RAID 8805, check out our Compatibility Reports.