Harvard Clean Energy Project Powered By HGST Enterprise Capacity Hard Drives

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 23, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) is partnering with the Harvard University Clean Energy Project (CEP) and providing HGST enterprise-class Ultrastar hard drives to house the project's research data. Harvard's CEP utilizes the World Community Grid, a distributed volunteer computing platform, to computationally study millions of potential chemical structures and identify the one that will enable the next-generation of plastic solar cells. These cells will be cost-effective and easy to manufacture in high volume in order to bring electricity to the estimated 2.5 billion people around the world living in rural areas without access to the power grid. Harvard's CEP volunteers generate approximately 750 gigabytes (GB) of data per day. Today, the project has stored 400 terabytes (TB) of data on HGST drives.

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"The data we're creating will ultimately benefit mankind with cleaner energy solutions," said Alan Aspuru-Guzik, who is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. "It is mission critical that our data be stored safely. Accordingly, we designed our Jabba storage arrays with built-in redundancies. But the key to the arrays' performance is the use of reliable, high-capacity, and low-power storage from HGST. We've filled nearly 150 HGST drives to this point and are currently building Jabba5 and 6 to handle the enormous amount of data generated for the project."

"HGST is honored to be involved in the Harvard CEP program. We believe their work has great potential for enabling the widespread deployment of solar power," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST. "It's exciting to see that the efforts we have put into making sure our hard drives provide world-class reliability will play a part in bringing electricity to billions around the world and improving their quality of life."

Proven in 24x7, high-transaction computing environments, HGST Ultrastar enterprise hard drives meet complex mission-critical storage and access needs delivering performance and reliability you can trust with industry-leading capacities up to 4TB. The 7,200 RPM Ultrastar family is one of the most popular and reliable high-capacity hard drives for enterprise applications offering a five-year limited warranty and rated for a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

About HGST
HGST (formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies or Hitachi GST), a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world's most valued data. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, HGST provides high-value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. HGST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company's website at http://www.hgst.com.

About the Harvard CEP
The Harvard CEP is a partnership between the Aspuru-Guzik Group and the IBM World Community Grid that was launched to address the challenges associated with formulating the chemical structure of novel high-performance organic photovoltaics (OPVs) using computational materials science. Carbon-based solar cells have emerged as interesting alternatives to traditional photovoltaic technology. OPVs have great potential in two important areas: they promise simple, low-cost/high-volume production as well as the prospect of merging the unique flexibility and versatility of plastics with opto-electronic features. These properties make OPVs a promising candidate to achieve the widespread harvesting of solar energy.

One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.

SOURCE HGST, A Western Digital Company