14 DAY TRIAL // QNAP has network-attached storage devices with one, two, three, four, five or even more drive bays, but most of them can't support hard drive units of over 4 TB. Or they couldn't for the longest time.
Now, things have changed. 5 TB and 6 TB storage devices have been added to the support list by the firmware over the past few months.
More importantly, there is now support for 8 TB units, specifically the helium-filled He8 series from HGST, Western Digital's subsidiary that used to be Hitachi once upon a time.
From now on, whenever you buy one of the Turbo vNAS TVS-x80+ series of enterprise network-attached storage devices, you can be certain they will handle the HDDs.
Not just those, however. There are some other NAS units that support HGST's Ultrastar He8 HDDs now.
For the HGST Ultrastar He8 SATA 6 Gbps drives, you have the following: TS-x80, TS-x79, TVS-x71, TS-x70, TVS-x63, TS-x53 Pro, TS-x51, TS-x31+, TS-x31.
For SAS 12 Gbps drives, however, you will need the TS-x79-SAS series and/or the REXP expansion enclosures.
The benefits of using helium
Helium-filled hard disk drives are harder to make, since they need to be completely sealed off from the outside world.
However, the lower density of the gas compared to air allows for more platters to be squeezed close together inside a 3.5-inch form factor.
At the speeds that HDDs spin their platters, the disks tend to warp. With helium, they warp a lot less, allowing for seven platters to be used instead of the regular 5 limit.
So far, Ultrastar He8 HDDs from HGST have been primarily used by enterprises and large businesses, in their servers and data centers.
Now, though, NAS devices bought by small and medium businesses might consider them to be a worthwhile long-term investment. Hyperscale cloud data centers won't be the only bread and butter anymore.
QNAP NAS devices should receive firmware updates
All new NAS devices mentioned before will ship with He8 support pre-added, but the ones that are already out there should be easy enough to update via the support pages of each NAS model.