WD ships the HGST Ultrastar He10 HDD third-gen helium drive

Western Digital, one of the biggest names in hard drive manufacturing, may have just outdone their competition with the announcement of the new HGST Ultrastar He10.

Western Digital HGST division has announced that it is now shipping the world’s first 10TB hard disk drive.

Designed by Western Digital’s HGST subsidiary – formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, prior to its acquisition – the Ultrastar He10 10TGB drive was announced back in September past year, but shipped in only sample quantities to interested customers.

The inclusion of seven platters in a 3.5-inch hard drive is something Seagate hasn’t managed to achieve, which is why the company hasn’t released a drive larger than 8 TB. A drive like this isn’t targeted at home users, where $800 is unreasonable for a hard drive, but instead data center and enterprise customers who need the last word in fast storage. “We were the first to recognize the benefits of Helium and have pushed the boundaries while others are scrambling to catch up”.

All that capacity only needs about seven watts to keep spinning, and HGST says that represents a 56% drop in power used per terabyte compared to its previous generation of drives.

Netflix’s director of content delivery architecture David Fullagar said, “Netflix has built an industry-leading Content Delivery Network and these 10TB drives will allow us to quickly integrate, build more capacity and stream more movies to our consumers”.

The 7200rpm Ultrastar He10 HDD (see specification sheet) comes with either a 6Gbps SATA or 12Gbps SAS interface and has maximum sustained read/write data transfer rates of 249MB/s and 225MB/s, respectively.

“When the first generation of products came out there was quite a premium on price per terabyte, but after about six months of this third generation we’re expecting that price to cross over with the cost of air drives for the first time, as adoption has increased allowing us to make quantity-of-scale reductions”.

For more information on the Ultrastar He10 HDD, http://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-he10.

Both HGST and Seagate are working on HAMR drives, though Seagate has been more vocal about it, saying that it could have some HAMR drives on the market in 2016. For more information, please visit www.hgst.com. One PB is equal to 1,000 TB (one quadrillion bytes). Usable capacity will vary from the raw capacity due to object storage methodologies and other factors.