Seagate on Jan. 13 unveiled its highest-ever capacity enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled model that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung.
Because it is filled with helium instead of air, the 3.5-inch Seagate Enterprise Capacity HDD inherently has less drag on its internal components, enabling them to run cooler and with less power than standard HDDs. Being helium-tight also enables it to be a lot less affected by external influences, such as flooding.
Samsung may own the current capacity record with a 16TB hard disk it introduced last fall, but it currently costs $7,000 and probably isn’t going to be high on many wish lists until the price comes down by at least 50 percent. HGST may be the furthest ahead of the group, since its 10TB helium drive came out in September 2014.
Seagate is aiming the new drive at cloud-based data storage needs, which are expanding all the time with no ceiling in sight.
The 10TB HDD uses the standard 3.5-inch disk design and incorporates seven platters and 14 heads. Seagate said the drive features the industry’s lowest power/TB ratio and weight specifications for a 10TB HDD. This breaks down to 25 percent more density to help businesses increase petabytes per rack, the company said.
The new HDD uses advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data center managers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly, Seagate said.
It delivers an improved MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2.5 million hours and provides consistent performance to customers in a 24×7 multi-drive environment. The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is available in both a 6GB/s SATA and 12 GB/s SAS interfaces.
The new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 10TB is now shipping to select customers worldwide. For pricing and more information, go here.