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takyon writes:

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.

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