On Wednesday, Seagate announced its first 3.5-inch, 10-terabyte enterprise capacity hard drives built on years of R&D in sealed-drive technology for the growing demands of public and private cloud-based datacenters. The drive is filled and sealed in with helium to create a turbulence-free, quiet environment in rack-mounted spaces typically filled with hundreds of drives operating around the clock. This design choice decreases both friction and resistance on the platters and, in Seagate’s case, delivers the industry’s lowest power-to-terabyte (TB) ratio and weight specifications for a 10-terabyte drive.

Seagate is not the first-to-market with a helium-filled 10TB drive though. Back in June 2015, HGST (formerly Hitachi’s hard drive division) shipped its first 10TB enterprise-grade helium drives cleverly named the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 Series. Like Seagate’s new drives, the HGST lineup also utilizes the Shingled Magnetic Recording technique to write new data tracks that partially overlap previously written tracks. This ultimately leaves the previous data track narrow and allows for higher track density.

Source: Seagate

Seagate’s new drives employ seven platters, 14 heads and use the company’s PowerBalance™ feature to optimize IOPS per watt for even more efficiency.

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) allows for up to 25 percent more aerial density than before (when comparing a 6TB non-SMR drive to an 8TB SMR drive), and eventually it is expected to enable data densities as high as 3 trillion bits per square inch. At a 10TB capacity, the technique now provides up to 40 percent more aerial density over a 6TB drive.

“At-scale data centers are faced with the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s new 10TB HDD for enterprise data centers is its first product to employ helium technology and will help data center customers to expand storage capacity economically.”

Seagate’s new enterprise capacity 10TB helium-filled hard drives are now shipping to select partners worldwide and are offered in SATA III 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps interfaces.