HGST Ultrastar He10 is the world's first 10TB Helium-filled hard drive

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) owned HGST has announced the launch of the world’s first Helium-filled 10TB hard drive. Called the HGST Ultrastar He10, the drive is the largest capacity drop-in ready drive and according to HGST, it also provides the lowest power consumption per TB. HGST hasn’t announced an official price tag for this drive.

This is WDC’s third generation of helium hard drives, the Ultrastar He10 is targetted at enterprise use in the video, photo, business and other cloud-based applications as well as to be used in public and private cloud deployments. It comes with a 2.5-million mean time between failures (MTBF) and a 5-year warranty.

The Ultrastar He10 houses seven platters into the standard 1-inch drive. It uses perpendicular magnetic recording, which is the standard recording technique used in regular consumer hard drives. The drive is hermetically sealed and filled with Helium.

The reason behind using Helium instead of air is to reduce the drag on the drive’s moving components. This in effect reduces friction, thereby reducing heat - drives run much cooler than non-Helium drives. This brings down power consumption, thereby reducing energy costs.

“We were the first to recognise the benefits of Helium and have pushed the boundaries while others are scrambling to catch up. The Ultrastar He10 represents the third generation of our HelioSeal line. It redefines enterprise capacity HDDs, showing the industry where storage devices need to go, to stay in front of the future that data growth is hurtling towards,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST.

Netflix’s director of content delivery architecture David Fullagar said, “Netflix has built an industry-leading Content Delivery Network and these 10TB drives will allow us to quickly integrate, build more capacity and stream more movies to our consumers.”