Hitachi hits the 10TB HDD mark with helium-filled model

WD's HGST division introduced a couple of new enterprise storage solutions. First up the company announces that it started shipping its 8TB UltraStar He8, the firm's second-generation helium-filled HDD. This model promises 23 percent lower power consumption (versus the Ultrastar 7K6000) and 33 percent more capacity versus 6TB HDDs.

More excitingly, HGST also introduces world's first 10TB HDD! This disk not only uses HelioSeal technology but also Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). SMR is a technique to increase storage density by letting written data tracks partially overlap the previous ones, you can find a more detailed explanation at HGST's website. The 10TB HDDs are sampling right now, it's unknown when they will be commercially available.

The Ultrastar 7K6000 on the other hand is a conventional HDD that promises the best price per terabyte ratio. Available in 5TB and 6TB versions, the UltraStar 7K6000 packs up to 1.2TB per disk on each of its five platters.

HGST’s high-volume air-based platform has been delivering on the promise of high-capacity, high-reliability and performance for decades. However, as the industry continues to push device capacities higher and higher, a transition to helium sealed HDD technology will become essential to achieving these increases while also maintaining reliability. HGST’s HelioSeal platform represents proven innovation in high capacity HDD technology and reliability. Already widely adopted by top OEMs and the largest search, social and cloud service providers, the HelioSeal platform will be used for all future HGST capacity enterprise HDDs. As the first and only company to ship hermetically sealed, helium-filled HDDs, HGST provides with its helium platform a long-term path for delivering the highest capacities, while significantly lowering power consumption and cooling, and providing the reliability demanded by data center operators.

8TB HDD Now Shipping, Delivering 33 Percent More Capacity and 23 Percent Lower Power* – HGST’s 8TB Ultrastar He8 is the company’s second-generation helium-filled HDD. The 8TB Ultrastar He8 extends HGST’s leadership in delivering technology and innovation that advances the TCO value proposition for cloud data centers, enterprises, OEMs and system integrators. Outstripping what any HDD vendor can do using air, the Ultrastar He8 enables more efficient data center designs and operations by reducing the physical and carbon footprint of the overall storage systems. Addressing the largest data center challenges, the sealed, helium-filled hard drives enable lower power consumption and higher density storage systems, requiring less rack space. Additionally, the helium-sealed hard drives require less cooling and can be used more reliably in wider operating environments such as ambient data centers. Based on mainstream perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, the Ultrastar He8 can be deployed into any application or environment without tradeoffs in performance or device compatibility. The Ultrastar He8 comes in both 8TB and 6TB capacities. The drives are currently being qualified by leading companies such as Netflix, Huawei, Inspur and Promise Technology as well as other top OEMs and cloud customers around the world.

World’s First 10TB HDD with the Lowest $/TB and Watt/TB – HGST announces the world’s first data center-class 10TB HDD for cloud and cold storage applications. This drive sets unprecedented capacity leadership at the lowest $/TB and watt/TB by harnessing two complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). The additive nature of these two technologies enables the future design platform for HDDs in delivering higher capacity points at accelerated time-to-market entry. It also provides the foundation for all future scaling technologies, putting HGST on an accelerated path to delivering high capacities into existing and future form factor designs. HGST is currently sampling the new 10TB HDDs.

6TB Areal Density Leader Now Shipping, Providing the Best $/TB – The Ultrastar 7K6000 is HGST’s seventh generation air-based platform, enabling industry leading performance at high capacities (5TB and 6TB) in a standard 3.5-inch HDD design. Now shipping, the 6TB Ultrastar 7K6000 delivers 1.2TB per disk in a five-disk solution. Based on HGST’s mature, proven, high reliability platform, the Ultrastar 7K6000 family targets all traditional and rapidly growing scale out storage applications, including object, block and file storage architectures. It’s designed to help data center customers capture the growth and long-term value of data by providing huge capacity, best-in-class 7,200 RPM performance and the best $/GB acquisition cost. The drive is currently being qualified by industry-leading cloud and OEM customers worldwide such as Huawei, Sugon and Nimble Storage.