Seagate Launches Their Own Helium HDD

Even as rival HGST started shipping helium based drives several years back, Seagate had managed to keep up in terms of capacity with less exotic technology. That’s all set to change as Seagate has finally launched their own helium based 10TB HDD. The new drive will do battle with the PMR based HGST Ultrastar He10 which just started shipping two months ago while the slower SMR based Ultrastar Archive Ha10 launched 7 months ago.

Just like the HGST drive, the Seagate^® Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD features seven platters and 14 heads to read and write from them. With a helium fill, Seagate is probably running the drive at 7200rpm unlike normal drives which generally have to slow down when the platter count reaches 6. As an enterprise drive, it comes with a choice of either the standard SATA 3 port as well as the 12Gb/s SAS connector.

Reported reliability is the same as its chief competitor with 2.5 million hours MTBF, a nice bump over the usual 2 million. Due to the helium fill reducing turbulence nad allowing more platters, Seagate has stuck with PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) and not with the performance crippling SMR (shingled magnetic recording). HAMR also isn’t used since that will probably be done with air-filled drives first. While HGST/WD has beaten Seagate to the punch with Helium, Seagate may bring HAMR out first given they’ve been talking about it a lot more.