Seagate 10TB helium-filled hard drives pricing and release information for has not been revealed yet, while some estimate to have an expected retail price of $800.
After a slow initial response to Western Digital subsidiary HGST’s efforts at creating helium-filled drives, Seagate has finally decided to join others. Western Digital/HGST have had helium-filled drives on the market since 2013.
Seagate 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive
We do know that the drive uses Seagate’s own PowerChoice tech for power conservation, but do not know just how much power is used by the hardware. It should be noted that while HGST was eager to announce their hermetically sealed helium-filled hard drives, Seagate wasn’t nearly as detailed in the press release published on its website. The first helium-filled Seagate’s 10TB hard drive complete with seven platters, the same as in the 10TB drive from HGST, as well as 14 total heads! So far it’s not clear how fast the spindle is going to run, likely 7200RPM?
The Mean Time Between Failure, or MTBF rate is 2.5 million hours for Seagate, a considerable improvement over the company’s drives absent helium, is again the same as HGST’s helium-filled drives.
The biggest surprise is that Seagate’s 10TB hard drive is expected to use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) as opposed to shingled magnetic recording (SMR). In the past, SMR integration let Seagate keep up with HGST in capacity, compromising on performance and longevity while cashing on data recovery.
Over the years the drive manufacturers, began to realize that because helium isn’t as thick as air the drag will drop and they will be able to squeeze seven, instead of six, full platters into their standard 3.5-inch drives without any kind of concession in performance.
The future
This new line of hard drives comes with no surprise as the 2015th Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) Conference, organized by the IEEE Magnetics Society and the American Physical Society in Las Vegas 2015 did show how hard drives are going to increase the capacity this is another step in that direction.
