Western Digital Announces World's First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive

Western Digital today the first 10TB hard disk drive (HDD) based on its HelioSeal Platform, which hermetically seals helium gas in the drive to decrease friction.

The new 3.5-in. Ultrastar He10 HDD is based on WD's third-generation HelioSeal Platform, which also consumes less power per terabyte of capacity than any previous drive the company has shipped.

Besides being filled with helium, the new HDD uses typical perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to fit 10TB of capacity on seven platters with an areal density of 816Gbits per square inch.

The new HDD represents a 25% increase in capacity over the previous generation 8TB Ultrastar He8 HDD and uses 56% less watts/TB than traditional air-filled HDDs. The drive uses as little as 0.5 watts per terabyte while idle; the SATA model uses 6.8 watts while operating and the SAS model uses 9.5 watts while spinning, which is still 56% less power than the previous generation, WD said.

The Ultrastar He10 also boasts a 2.5 million mean-time-between-failures (MBTF) rating as well as a five-year warranty.

The 7200rpm Ultrastar He10 HDD comes with either a 6Gbps SATA or 12Gbps SAS interface and has maximum sustained read/write data transfer rates of 249MB/s and 225MB/s, respectively.

WD is pitching the new HDD as "drop-in" ready, meaning there's no additional software required for the drives to function in a server or array. That's not the case with high-capacity drives that use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) versus PMR technology.

An internal look at WD's new Ultrastar He10 helium-filled hard disk drive.

Both WD and Seagate have continued to boost the capacity of drives for archived data using SMR. Seagate, for example, believes SMR holds the promise of creating 20TB drives by 2020.

"[WD's] new Ultrastar 10TB He10 will help address the need for higher capacity, and higher density storage racks in enterprise datacenters," John Rydning, IDC's research vice president of research, said in a statement.

In a statement, WD said it expects its 10TB drives to be key enablers of video, photo, business and other cloud-based applications, and will be a cornerstone for future public and private cloud deployments.