Back in September 2012, HGST first announced their Helium Hard Drive Platform. The Helium drives began to ship the following year in November and as of last month, HGST has deployed over a million drives. We had previously reviewed the Ultrastar He6 6TB helium drive. Now HGST has taken their helium technology and expanded capacity

SMR uses a mapping system for LBAs that want to get written randomly to only writing them sequentially. Similar to SSD’s Flash Translation Layer (FTL), SMR HDDs use what is sometimes called a SMR (or Shingle) Translation Layer (STL), which is a similar concept. With SMR, however, much more is to be gained by making the

Today WD, a Western Digital company, introduced a new high capacity 3.5” hard drive purpose built for the greater demands of scalable network video recorder (NVR) surveillance systems, the WD Purple NV. The WD Purple NV comes in both 4TB and 6TB capacities and has a 3-year warranty.

The Seagate Enterprise Performance 15k HDD is the fifth generation of Seagate’s Enterprise Performance line. The drive is a 2.5” form factor, 15K SAS 12Gb/s HDD coupled with the “TurboBoost” of 32GB of eMLC flash for faster read and write performance as well as 128MB multisegmented cache. The drive comes with a maximum capacity of

HGST, a Western Digital company, has announced a new milestone as they have deployed over a million of their helium-filled hard drive disks (HDD). With this news, HGST believes that its helium filled drives will become the mainstream choice for data centers where storage density, reliability and power efficiency are paramount. HGST is now shipping

Today WD, a Western Digital company, announced the worlds most power-efficient, 6TB HDD for datacenters, the WD Re+ hard drive family. The new drives only consume 6 watts per 6TB. WD has also announced that the WD Re And WD Se will now be expanding to include a 6TB model as well.

The Seagate Archive HDD represents several major advancements in hard drive technology for the company. First, the massive 8TB capacity is Seagate’s highest to date. Second, the methodology to get to that 8TB is new to the market. Seagate uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to change the way tracks are laid out on the platters,

In the simplest terms, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is a new hard drive technology that allows the tracks on a platter to be layered on top of each other, just like roof shingles on a house, to increase platter density or tracks per inch (TPI). Current technology, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), uses a parallel track

HGST has expanded their line of Deskstar NAS HDDs to include a 6TB model, which is optimized for small enterprise, SOHO, or consumer environments leveraging up to 8-bay NAS systems. HGST has promised both reliability and performance from these 7,200RPM 3.5" drives, maintaining 1 million hours of use between failures and delivering seek times of