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from the now-more-storage-and-still-with-enterprisey-stuff dept.
HGST, a division of Western Digital, has announced its second 10 terabyte helium-filled hard drive. The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 , announced back in June, was a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive. Now HGST has launched the Ultrastar He10, a 10 TB helium-filled HDD using traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). With a total of 7 platters, each platter stores around 1.43 TB. AnandTech reports:
Hard drives are struggling to reach the 10TB capacity point with traditional PMR technology. While Seagate did announce a few 8TB PMR drives earlier this quarter, it really looks like vendors need to move to some other technology (shingled magnetic recording or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)) in order to keep the $/TB metric competitive against the upcoming high-capacity SSDs. As of now, helium seems to be the only proven solution causing minimal performance impact and HGST appears to have a strong hold in this particular market segment.
Ars Technica has some speculation about the price:
There's no price listed for the Ultrastar He10, but it'll probably cost about £600/$800. The first helium-filled drives were extortionately expensive, but the He8 is now down to around £400/$550, which isn't bad for an enterprise drive (these things have a 5-year warranty and other such niceties, too). Seagate's shingled 8TB drive is much cheaper (£170/$200), but you get a shorter warranty and less enterprisey stuff.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday December 03 2015, @04:52PM
There's a reason such commercial items state minimum / maximum temperatures, minimum / maximum G-force etc. and even sometimes altitude.
17,000 feet is not a "normal" altitude. Putting it on a plane is probably vibration more than anything causing it to fail, not to mention static.
I'm sure pressure plays a part too, but when you put things outside their spec, the only way to find out if it's going to work is to do it. A catastrophic failure of the drive, though unlikely, is something you won't be able to do anything about if it happens at 17,000ft.