PC Perspective: CES 2015: Storage Visions Sightings DriveSavers and SanDisk

By Allyn Malventano of PC Perspective

Many of the storage announcements this year are under embargo until tomorrow or later in the week.

Fortunately there was plenty of things on display out in the open – meaning fair game for me to photograph and present to you in this quick photo walkthrough.

The HGST Ultrastar He8 was on display. This is a 7-platter Helium filled HDD. The lower density atmosphere enables more platters and higher spin speeds without producing too much heat for the drive to handle.

The added platters also enable a very large capacity of 8TB, all while consuming less power than most other available non-He HDD’s, which is attractive for enterprise usage where racks upon racks are filled with these drives.

The display model we saw here was covered with plexiglass, but the DriveSavers folks had one completely open in all of its glory:

Seeing the head pack out of a drive is rare, as you’re supposed to only get to that point in a clean room environment (unless you don’t want your data back, that is). DriveSavers told us the challenge to recovery from an He HDD is getting the Helium back into the housing prior to closing it back up after a failed component replacement. Here’s a closer look at that head pack. Note the small logic die built into the ribbon – this component needs to be mounted as close as possible to the heads to minimize interference and signal loss from the very high frequency signal coming from the read heads:

DriveSavers also has recently announced data recovery capability and partnership with SanDisk. There is a separate announcement we will be covering later in the week, but since we’re talking about SanDisk, here is a look at the non-embargoed products we were allowed to show for now:

From left: UltraDIMM, FusionIO Atomic, Optimus Max, Optimus MAX (opened), Optimus ECO. More interesting here is that SanDisk is able to pack 4TB into the Optimus form factor. They accomplish this by a unique folding PCB design shown below in unfolded form:

That’s it for this update, more to follow shortly.
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