Western Digital's HGST says it has has already shipped more than one million helium-filled hard disk drives, rated for two and a half (2.5) million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). Now shipping its second generation HelioSeal Platform drives, HGST is shifting its volume mix and ramping Helium production to meet demand across cloud and mainstream data center applications.

The company is increasing production of its 3.5-inch Ultrastar He8, 8TB drives - the highest capacity available in the market. HGST's HelioSeal technology allows this to be accomplished at standard 7,200 RPM performance with low power while competitive air based products typically reduce RPM and performance to achieve lower power.

Both the Ultrastar He8 and the Ultrastar He6 families now feature a reliability rating of 2.5M hours MTBF. Due to its patented manufacturing process and the inherent benefits of Helium, HGST's HelioSeal drives are field proven and have a more robust design margin than traditional air based drives. The drives are hermetically-sealed, which keep air, humidity and other contaminates out of the drive, allowing them to be used in harsh or ambient environments. The Helium inside the drives also reduces disk vibration and flutter, adding to even greater reliability.

The new disks spin more easily in a helium-filled environment, resulting in 23% lower operating power. The 8TB helium drives consume 5.1 watts during idle operation, a 44% reduction in watts-per-TB compared to conventional 6TB air-based HDDs.

In addition, HGST Helium-filled drives typically run 4°~5°C cooler, which lowers power and cooling costs and leads to better field reliability, allowing HGST to increase its MTBF specification for the He6 and He8 drives.

HGST is shipping its 6TB Ultrastar He6 and 8TB Ultrastar He8 helium-filled drives in volume today.

The company will continue to extend the capacity of its HDDs by combining two complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) in its 10TB helium-drives, which are already sampled.

HGST expects that by 2017, 50 percent of its enterprise capacity drive shipments will be Helium.