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Helium Drives to Improve Efficiency of Data Centers
Green Technology Featured Articles
November 07, 2013

Helium Drives to Improve Efficiency of Data Centers

By Lavanya Rathnam
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Advancements in technology have transformed traditional society into a digital one. New devices and applications come up almost every day and this entails the creation of vast amounts of data. Companies use data centers in different locations to store this data and retrieve it when needed. However, data centers consume a lot of power and it is estimated that this power consumption is almost 1.5 percent of the world's total energy. Also, these data centers occupy a lot of space which makes it that much more expensive for companies to expand their existing facilities.


 To overcome these problems and to make room for higher storage and power efficiency, Western Digital (News - Alert) has come up with a new drive that is based on helium. Known as Ultrastar He6 drives, this model puts the spinning disks in a chamber filled with helium instead of air. The advantage with helium is that is lighter in density and as a result, reduces the turbulence caused due to the spinning of disks. This lower turbulence, in turn, makes it possible to fit in more platters in the same disk. This is why this disk has seven platters with a capacity of 6TB as opposed to standard drives that have a capacity of 4TB only. Further, power consumption is reduced by 49 percent and the amount of heat wasted is also reduced. Therefore, data centers do not have to spend money on cooling devices either.

 Due to these reasons, these helium disks are expected o reduce power consumption and increase storage capacity. Using this technology, Western Digital and its subsidiary HGST plans to roll out a range of storage devices. The current focus of its engineers is to work on cold storage devices that will store infrequent data that will be available for access readily. It is hoped that these drives will lay the foundation for future technologies that aim on power saving.




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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