HGST has just announced its 10TB, 3.5-inch hard disk drive. Though the drive isn’t ready for mass shipment, the Western Digital company managed to beat Seagate at its own game. According to the company, their feat is a world’s first, and this enterprise-class 3.5-inch drive is targeted at data centers operating cloud and cold storage solutions.
(Image source: HGST)
In order to pull off this feat, HGST made use of two technologies; which are HelioSeal and shingled magnetic recording (SMR). With HelioSeal, the air inside the drive is replaced with helium, the drive’s power consumption and operating temperature are lowered. In turn, this allows for higher density storage. Speaking of higher density storage, SMR works by squeezing the data tracks of the HDD's platter closer together, by removing the guard space that exists between data tracks of conventional magnetic recording HDDs. However, due to the manner the data tracks are written in SMR, this may lead to performance degradation.
HGST said that they are currently “sampling the 10TB drive”, and with this announcement, they managed to beat Seagate at its own game. The latter made known its plans to deliver a 10TB, 3.5-inch drive earlier this year in July.
(Source: HGST, Market Watch)
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