Tom's IT Pro: HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB HDD Review

Storage vendors are making radical technology advances in an attempt to provide enough storage for the avalanche of data generated every year. The challenge is to store this influx of data economically, and that requires power efficiency and density.

Unfortunately, low power often equates to low performance. Performance is important because data centers are tasked with getting data out to customers quickly, which doesn't mesh well with low-power requirements. Incoming data is perhaps the most valuable commodity, and performance is also important for rapid ingestion to fuel analytics routines that are capable of deriving actionable real-time data.

HGST's 8TB Ultrastar He8 Enterprise HDD wades into a data center environment that has an insatiable thirst for capacity and an equally passionate desire for efficiency and performance. HGST's capacious 8TB He8 HDD is the second generation of its helium platform, which increases density and lowers power consumption by filling the drive with helium instead of air. HGST's media caching technology is also compelling and provides a surprising boost in random write performance.

The real question is how it fares against competing high-capacity HDDs, so come along as we put the HGST Ultrastar He8 under the Tom's IT Pro microscope.