With the rise of SSDs, hard drive manufacturers have turned to capacity as their major stronghold. Earlier this year, Seagate revealed their first 10TB hard disk drive, challenging Western Digital’s own 10TB drive. Like other high capacity drives, the 10TB model requires the use of helium. The drives have now started shipping in volume and entered regular production. At the time of the January announcement, the Enterprise Capacity hard drive was already in use with Huawei and Alibaba.
As we noted during the initial announcement, 10TB perpendicular magnetic recording drives are only possible with the use helium, If it wasn’t for the reduced friction and turbulence of helium, less platters could be fitted. That would require the use of slower shingled magnetic recording to reach the higher density. The drive reaches its capacity with the use of 7 platters and 14 read heads. It also features SATA 3 6Gb/s and SAS 12Gb/s variants.
Seagate has also added some other additional enterprise features like PowerChoice and PowerBalance to eek more power efficiency out of the drives. For big data, a more important metric is the total cost of ownership, where power consumption is paramount. Combined with the unmatched capacity, hard drives will stay relevant for much longer in the enterprise segment than the consumer one.
