Seagate Pumps Helium With 10TB 3.5-inch Enterprise HDD For Data Centers

Seagate is a bit late to the helium party, but this week announced its first 10TB enterprise-class helium-filled 3.5-inch hard drive. Although they have yet to reach retail shelves (neither brick and mortar or online), e-commerce giant Alibaba and smartphone darling Huawei are currently sampling the drives.

Western Digital/HGST has fielded helium-filled hard drives since 2013, so it’s quite odd that Seagate waited this long to bring its offering to the table. With that being said, Seagate claims that it has emerged with a 10TB device that has the “industry’s lowest power and weight” profiles. We already know the cost-saving benefits of reduced power consumption, but the latter point is also quite beneficial considering that some data centers have to reinforce their flooring to accommodate the weight of storage-heavy server farms. Every little gram counts when you’re talking about hundreds or even thousands of hard drives clustered together.

Moving on to the drive itself, which will be available in 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS version, this new 10TB entry includes seven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters (1.43TB each) and 14 heads. Seagate also employs advanced caching routines to improve performance along with PowerChoice and PowerBalance technology to help improve power management and efficiency.

The new helium-filled 10TB HDD is designed to operate in a 24-7 environment, hence it comes back with a MTBF rating of 2.5 million hours.

“Built on our years of research and development of sealed-drive technology, our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organizations worldwide solve the needs of their growing storage business,” said Seagate CTO Mark Re.

Seagate says that its helium-filled 10TB HDD is shipping right now to select partners, and we expect full retail availability in the coming months.