Seagate now delivery seven-platter, helium-crammed 10TB hard force

Seagate is now transport its 10TB helium-stuffed hard power in volume, and it’s hit this goal without the usage of performance-penalizing technology like SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). whilst early high-ability drives used SMR (a era wherein part of each music is overlaid atop the opposite, reminiscent of shingles), it penalizes power writes as compared with non-shingled perpendicular recording. SMR boosts densities, but it hurts read overall performance, and greater recent drives from all carriers have moved returned toward conventional perpendicular recording.

Helium-sealed difficult drives have been regularly making their manner into data facilities and corporation drives. At 10TB, Seagate is pushing the envelope on absolute drive capacity as nicely, with seven force platters and 14 heads in overall.

This slide is from an HGST presentation, no longer Seagate, but it illustrates why power producers have moved to helium as one method of improving business enterprise HDDs. through cutting resistance, they can stack extra platters in a given area, thereby growing force density. The reduced resistance can also reduce power intake; Seagate reports that helium HDDs can use as an awful lot as 2W much less energy per pressure than traditional HDDs. 2W won't sound like much, but in case you’ve got an array of numerous thousand drives, cutting energy consumption by way of 2W is a giant quantity of financial savings that also reduces data center cooling load.

a part of what’s using this shift to helium across the enterprise enterprise is the persevering with develop of stable country drives, or SSDs. even as employer SSDs have been fairly not unusual across the industry for a number of years, issues about reliability and rate ensured that traditional tough drives endured to electricity the overall marketplace. decreasing fees and the advent of technologies like 3-D NAND have allowed businesses like Samsung to move returned to older 40nm system generation with advanced reliability and ordinary overall performance. In brief, 3-d NAND / V-NAND can be used to create more dependable SSDs that perform higher over the long term.

at the same time as it’s genuine there’s still a vast gap among SSDs and HDDs in price-according to-GB, that gap has been shrinking dramatically in current years. 1TB SSDs can be had for as little as $219. The agency-magnificence SSDs that would compete with comparable products from HGST and Seagate are hugely greater costly, in both absolute price and price-consistent with-GB — but organisation hard drives aren’t precisely regarded for being cheaper, either. listing rate for a 6TB helium drive from HGST is presently ~$500, or double the price for a consumer 6TB power.

Pushing drive capacities upwards is one way enterprise manufacturers can continue to counter encroaching SSDs. Helium force tech is one functionality that’s now not expected to come back to the mass marketplace — the drives are too tough to fabricate to without difficulty scale the technology to the cutthroat international of finances hard drives.