HGST Announces 10TB HDD and PCI-E SSD for Data Centers
HGST, part of Western Digital, has announced an 8TB and a 10TB HelioSeal drive for the professional market, with the platters rotating in a helium-filled housing. In addition, the manufacturer comes with a PCI-e SSD.
The 8TB Ultrastar He8 drives, intended for use in data centers, will be available immediately, along with a 6TB version. The 10TB model, a 3.5″ drive that features seven platters, a 12Gbit/s SAS interface and 128MB cache, is currently under testing by HGST and partner companies. According to the manufacturer, its new Ultrastar He8 drives are currently delivering the most storage per dollar, while also the energy consumption per TB is low.The drives are said to be especially useful for storing media and large amounts of data, for example via cold storage, or long-term data storage.HGST gives a five-year warranty on the drives.
According to HGST, the high storage capacity of the 10TB hard disk is possible thanks to two techniques. For example, the HelioSeal technology ensures that the discs are filled with helium to reduce heat development due to air resistance in the housing. HGST plans to fill all its hard drives with helium in 2017. In addition, HGST uses a storage technology called shingled magnetic recording, in which data areas on a platter partly overlap. According to competitor Seagate, hard drives can be produced around the year 2020 that can store 20TB or more thanks to SMR technology.
HGST also announced the Ultrastar SN100 SSD series. These SSDs are available in a regular 2.5″ form factor, as well as as a PCI-e add-in card. The NVMe protocol is used to communicate with the PCI-e data bus. NVMe also makes optimizations The manufacturer says it will be able to supply SSDs with storage capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB, with the mlc nand chips coming from Toshiba. HGST is currently sending samples of the first models, with the manufacturer reporting that the performance is on average twice that of its current FlashMAX PCI-E SSDs.