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Seagate Following HGST With Same 10TB Helium HDD

Alibaba and Huawei first customers

Seagate Technology plc launched its first 10TB enterprise capacity HDD, merging high capacity with the industry’s lowest power and weight available in a 10TB drive, to meet the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based data centers.

seagate,10TB,helium,hdd

The Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD has been selected by enterprise market leaders globally for its ability to address storage demands unlike any other technology in the industry.

Cloud-based data center storage needs are expanding faster than many current infrastructures can sustain, rendering the capacity demands of users a herculean task for cloud managers,” said Mark Re, senior VP and CTO, Seagate. “Built on our years of R&D of sealed-drive technology, our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organizations worldwide solve the needs of their growing storage business.”

With the amount of data today growing at an increasingly rapid rate, we are always on the lookout for storage solutions that offer better performance with lower overhead,” said Fan Ruiqi, president of storage products, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.The new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD from Seagate helps us meet these demands by offering incredible capacity with improvements in power and weight allowing us to drastically reduce our costs.”

The robust 10TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD provides maximum storage capacity for easy system integration by using the standard 3.5-inch CMR design.

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. Offering 25% more density to help businesses increase petabytes per rack, the drive delivers higher performance and reduced power and weight.

More and more data centers 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 R&D, Alibaba.com. “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.

At-scale data centers are faced with the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research VP for HDDs. “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.”

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD improves performance by using advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data center managers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly. Featuring Seagate’s PowerChoice technology, the drive helps businesses manage and reduce the ongoing costs associated with power and cooling during idle time, while Seagate’s PowerBalance feature helps optimize the IO/s/watt for more efficiency.

It delivers an improved MTBF of 2.5 million hours and provides consistent performance to customers in a 24×7 multi-drive environment. Enterprise ready, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is available in both a 6Gb SATA and 12Gb SAS interfaces.

Comments

Seagate was working since many years on helium-filled HDD, but in R&D only. The company was reluctant to design a product that was supposed to arrive in 1H16. Finally it did it faster with a unit with about exactly the same specifications (see below) as Ultrastar Archive Ha10 from HGST pioneer in this technology with the first helium drive, at 8TB, released in September 2014 and then 10TB in June 2015.

The only differences, according to Seagate: "[it's] the industry's lowest power and weight available in a 10TB drive." But the company has not disclosed the idle and operating power nor the weight of its unit to prove that.

There is less friction and vibration inside the box with helium rather than air, permitting to add one more disk - and also all of them being thinner - and two heads in the same 3.5-inch form factor, and consequently to get more capacity.

The two nearline devices are so similar that we suppose the two manufacturers exchange some patents. It does not change a lot the price of their mutual devices as, in the HDD industry, all makers are putting all their patents in a global pool, each one paying only for the patents it does not own.

The problem for helium drives is their prices as cost of manufacturing is more expansive. Seagate does not reveal any figure. But you have to pay a large premium for helium technology. On Amazon.com, you can get a regular (without helium) 8TB Seagte unit for $220. With the same capacity, helium-based HGST Ultrastar HE8 8000GB is sold at $600. New competition between HGST and Seagate could lower helium drive prices.

We are now waiting to see if the third HDD maker, Toshiba, will also embrace helium gas.

10TB is today the highest capacity for HDDs and 12TB could be next step with SMR associated with helium and tomorrow HAMR. The same day of this Seagate's announcement, Fixstars launched SSD-13000M, the world's largest SSD at 13TB, and in 2.5-inch 15mm form factor. 

Comparison of HGST/WD and Seagate 10TB helium HDDs

Manufacturer HGST/WD Seagate
Model Ultrastar Archive Ha10 Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD
Announced in 06/2015 01/2016
Technology Helium and SMR Helium and SMR or PMR
Capacity 10TB 10TB
Form factor 3.5-inch 26.1mm 3.5-inch 26.1mm
Number of disks/heads 7/14 7/14
Rotational speed 7,200rpm probably 7,200rpm
Data buffer 256MB NA
Interface 6Gb SATA and 6Gb SAS 6Gb SATA and 12Gb SAS
Warranty 5 years 5 years
MTBF 2 million hours 2.5 million hours
Production now sampling

 

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