Helium-filled 10TB hard drive

Now Shipping 10TB helium-filled hard drive in volume, and it's hit this target without using performance-penalizing technologies like SMR (shingled Magnetic Recording). While early high-capacity drives Used SMR (and technology in Which part of each loop track is overlaid atop the other, resembling shingles), it penalizes drive writes compared with non-shingled perpendicular recording. SMR Boosts densities, but it hurts read performance, and more recent drives from all vendors have Moved back towards Conventional perpendicular recording.

        Helium-sealed hard drives have been gradually making Their way into data centers and enterprise drives. At 10TB, Sea gate is pushing the envelope on absolute drive capacity as well, with seven drive platters and 14 heads in total. This is a slide presentation from an HGST, Seagate not, but it illustrates why drive manufacturers have Moved to helium as one method of Improving enterprise HDDs. By cutting resistance; they can stack more platters in a given space, thereby Increasing density drive. The resistance can Decreased Also cut power consumption; Sea gate reports That helium HDDs can use as much as 2W less power per drive Than Conventional HDDs. 2W Might not sound like much, but if you've got an array of Several thousand drives, cutting power consumption by 2W is a Significant Amount of savings That Also Reduces data center cooling load.

               Part of what's driving this shift helium across the enterprise industry Continuing with the advance of solid state drives, or SSDs. While enterprise SSDs have been Fairly common across the industry for a number of years, Concerns about reliability and price ensured That Conventional hard drives Continued to power the overall market. Decreasing Costs and the advent of technologies like 3D NAND Allowed have companies like Samsung's move back to older 40nm process technology with superior reliability and overall performance. In short, 3D NAND / NAND-V can be Used to create more Reliable That SSDs perform better over the long term.

While it's true there's still a sizable gap Between SSDs and HDDs in cost-per-GB, That gap has been shrinking in recent years Dramatically. 1TB SSDs can be a snake for as little as $ 219th The enterprise-class SSDs That Would Compete with similar products from Seagate and HGST are vastly more expensive, in both absolute cost and cost-per-GB - but enterprise hard drives are not Exactly known for being inexpensive, Either. List Price for helium and 6TB drive from HGST is Currently ~ $ 500, or double the price for a consumer 6TB drive. Pushing Drive Capacities upwards is one way enterprise manufacturers can continue to counter encroaching SSDs. Helium drive tech capability is one that's not expected to come to the mass market - the drives are too Difficult to manufacture it Easily scale the technology to the world of budget Cutthroat hard drives