While you can make the argument that Western Digital’s newest HelioSealed products are elevating the company to new heights due to them being literally filled with helium, the brand is actually being slingshotted to the top of the storage market thanks to its top- notch, time-tested, and ever-reliable products that cover all the essential segments: internal hard drives, external hard drives, personal cloud storage, network attached storage, and data center drives.
We were able to snag a couple of minutes with Albert Chang, senior manager for product marketing at Western Digital APAC, and got to ask him about storage technology, the importance of choosing the right kind of storage media, and what Western Digital has in store for storage buffs.
24/7 Operation
“In order to run 24/7, you need to make sure that the drive has the capability to do so and that it is meant to do so,” said Chang. “The WD Red and WD Purple were designed for that purpose, whereas the WD Blue and the WD Black weren’t meant for extended periods of operation. But a lot of people use WD Black 24/7 which significantly shortens the life expectancy of the drive,” he added.
To withstand such stresses, WD designed its newest 8 TB networking WD Red and surveillance WD Purple drives with HelioSeal technology, StableTrac platter stabilizers, NoTouch Ramp Load, and Dual Stage Actuator mechanisms which help them perform better than standard drives. These result in a more reliable and longer-lasting drive that has greater storage density, produces less heat, and draws less power, all in all improving the total cost of ownership.
Knives to a Fistfight
“When it comes to drive choice, it comes down to what the user is doing,” explained Chang regarding what types of drives fit what purposes. “As opposed to regular users, professionals have different needs. On top of requiring multiple backups, they need proven drives that are designed for their specific application.”
For those who require multiple file copies, WD offers their My Cloud and My Passport lineup on top of their internal platter options. These enable consumers and prosumers to easily make several backups of their critical files. Because nobody likes the headache of manually creating multiple copies of data, these ship with WD SmartWare and WD Sync for a more streamlined redundancy and file management experience.
Capacity is King
While the company is still mum on whether HelioSeal will trickle into their other products, Chang said that the process will lead to bigger capacities down the road. “Because we cannot change the form factor, HelioSeal allows us to put more platters into a single drive for even more storage.” And combined with developments in magnetic recording technology, large capacity drives will soon become the rule rather than the exception.
“Capacity will continue to drive this market,” were Chang’s ending words and we’re inclined to agree. As multimedia content increases in quality and resolution, it will be very difficult to trim down on storage.
After all, you’d have to put your movie and TV series collection somewhere.