Digital
storage is always getting cheaper and more capacious—but Western
Digital has a plan to fill it with helium to make hard drives way more
efficient than ever before.
If
you could see inside a normal hard drive, you’d find it was a pretty
brutal environment. The plates on which data are stored spin at
incredibly high speed—thousands of revolutions per minute—and while
you might not expect it, it’s the drag from those plates spinning
through the air inside the drive that limits the number that can be
stacked together. Yup, just like air resistance stops vehicles going
fast, it does the same to your data.
But
instead of air, Western Digital is now creating hard drives that are
filled with helium,
reports All Things D.
Lighter than air, helium cuts the drag forces right down. Indeed, Western Digital can now
squeeze in seven where previously it could only manage five; the
first drive to roll off the production line has a capacity of
six terabytes, versus four for conventional drives, for
instance. All
Things D explains what that means:
Deploying
11 petabytes of storage using current drive technology requires 12
racks and 2,880 hard drives, and about 33 kilowatts of power to run
them. With the new helium-based technology, you could do it with
eight racks and 1,920 individual drives, and run them on 14
kilowatts.
Perhaps
predictably, the first units won’t be for consumers, but rather
commercial enterprises. So, Netflix will be using them to store
movies, and CERN to store experimental data. Then maybe, one day
soon, you might have some helium in your hard drive, too. [All
Things D]
Image by lkaestner under Creative Commons license
