WD leapfrogs Seagate with world’s highest capacity 10TB helium drive

[Arthur]

10TB = 9.09495 Tebibytes.

 

Sources: Computerworld / The Register

 

Last November, HGST announced its first helium-filled hard drive, the 6TB (He6) model that broke all previous records for hard drive areal density.

 

Today, HGST said that by 2017, it plans to end production of air-filled hard drives for use in corporate data centers, replacing all of its models with helium filled products.

 

Along with the thinner gas's ability to reduce power use, the helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated. Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

 

HGST's announcement comes less than two weeks after Seagate announced its highest capacity enterprise hard drive, an 8TB model that bypassed helium for air.

 

Instead of helium, Seagate uses a technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to increase the capacity of its drives beyond 4TB. Seagate has said SMR holds the promise of creating 20TB drives by 2020.

 

With SMR technology, Seagate has been able to increase bit density on its platters by 25% or more. Unlike standard perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), where data tracks rest side by side, SMR overlaps the tracks on a platter like shingles on a roof, thereby allowing Seagate to squeeze more tracks together on a hard drive platter.

 

HGST's new 3.5-in 8TB drive uses traditional PMR technology, but the new 10TB hard drive marks WD's foray into SMR in conjunction with the helium gas. Both drives use a 12Gbps SAS interface. By using helium instead of air, HGST said it was able to stack 7 platters and reduce power usage at idle by 23% and watts per terabyte of capacity by 44% over its 6TB drive.

 

The 8TB drive is being marketed as nearline storage for faster access. The 10TB helium-filled hard drive is being targeted at cloud and archive "cold storage" applications because there are performance hindering implications related to the SMR technology, including file systems and software drivers, according to Dave Tang, general manager of HGST's Elastic Storage Platforms Group.

 

Both new drives come with a 128MB cache buffer, a five year warranty and a two million hour meantime between failures (MTBF) rating.

 

The new hard drives also come with WD's "Instant Secure Erase" feature, which overwrites data multiple times to ensure deletion.

 

Both 8TB and 10TB drives are shipping or sampling today.

[localzuk]

Nice. Great for high density data situations.

 

However, the sizes are now starting to show real disparity between advertised sizing and what you get in the end. It wasn't such an issue when the difference worked out as a few MB but when its about 1/10th of the size difference it is rather jarring!