Western Digital subsidiary HGST has announced the Ultrastar Archive Ha10, a 10 terabyte helium-filled shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drive. It rotates at 7,200 RPM and has a 256MB cache.
HGST has also released libzbc, "a simple library providing functions for manipulating disks supporting the Zoned Block Command (ZBC) and Zoned-device ATA command set (ZAC)."
The new drive is intended for enterprise bulk storage that is infrequently accessed. SMR tracks are partially overlapped which can hurt drive performance. The Ha10 has lower sequential write speeds than the He8. Seagate has already released 8 TB SMR drives.
What's next? 12 TB? 16 TB? HAMR?
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:55AM
I dunno, I could imagine a data center full of Hydrogen drives being a scary place if there was an earthquake. Even if there was no danger, I imagine the paperwork involved in shipping something potentially explosive, and doing all the safety testing required to prove that it won't explode would be prohibitive. In any event, surrounding your biits with an inert gas is probably best even without any human safety factor. The safety of the bits is what matters most, and Helium won't generally have any sort of chemical reaction with the platters or heads. Or anything else.