Seagate Fires Back At HGST With 10TB Helium Hard Drive For Data Centres

Seagate has revealed to the world its first ever helium hard disk drive, weighing in with 10TB of storage space.

The 3.5-inch hard drive is targeting the data centre, with Seagate claiming the HDD will meet the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based facilities.

The announcement from Seagate comes hot on the heels of an identical product launch from Western Digital’s HGST, which announced a 10TB data centre HDD back in December.

Turbulence

The use of helium, hermetically sealed in the HDD case, basically means there is less turbulence from spinning fans and moving parts, decreasing friction on the storage platters. This is because Helium is less dense than air, allowing more platters to be put into the HDD.

“Incorporating seven platters and 14 heads, the drive seals in helium to create a turbulence-free, quiet environment, decreasing both friction and resistance on the platters and delivering the industry’s lowest power/TB ratio and weight specifications for a 10TB HDD,” said Seagate.

“Seagate’s new 10TB HDD for enterprise data centres is its first product to employ helium technology and will help data centre customers to expand storage capacity economically,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research VP for hard disk drives.

The HDDs come in a choice of 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS interfaces.

“More and more data centres are being put into operation as a result of data growing at an exponential rate. With this in mind, we are laser focused on lowering our TCO and confident the new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD can help us with this endeavor,” said Li Shu, senior expert technical support for storage and research and development, at Alibaba. “We value the drives winning combination of higher storage capacities, increased performance and low power consumption— making it a win-win for both us and our customers.”

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