HGST delivers first 10TB HDD with helium

WD has started shipping the HGST Ha10 drives with 10TB storage. The drives aimed at enterprise applications are filled with helium instead of air. As a result, the platters and heads suffer less from friction.

HGST has been supplying the first disks filled with helium since November 2013. That was first a 6TB variant and later an 8TB. HGST, part of Western Digital, supplies this second generation of helium-filled drives under the name Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR-hdd.

It is the company’s first drive to use SMR, or shingled magnetic recording. SMR is a way of storing data on magnetic tracks that overlap slightly, increasing the data density. A magnetic disk write head makes less narrow tracks than a read head can read, so there may be a small overlap of the adjacent tracks. The disadvantage is that the performance is slightly lower due to SMR, but for the purpose for which the discs are made, that is probably not a problem.

The main market that HGST focuses on with the disks are mainly companies that have to archive large amounts of data, where according to the company data is mainly stored and read sequentially instead of randomly. The 3.5″ drive rotates at 7200rpm, features seven platters, a 6Gbit/s SAS interface and 256MB cache

HGST provides an open source SDK through Github to facilitate application development and deployment with the new smr command set for Linux. Prices are on request.