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 sudo rm -rf on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:32PM
Hydrogen is a hard to contain gas
Exactly. H2 is so small that it diffuses through metal (e.g the platters) and makes it brittle [wikipedia.org].