Seagate Launches 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive

According to an article in eWeek, Seagate recently unveiled its highest capacity ever enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled design, that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung. Because it is filled with helium instead of air, the 3.5-inch Seagate Enterprise Capacity HDD has less drag on its internal components, enabling them to run cooler and with less power than standard HDDs.

Samsung currently owns the capacity record with a 16TB hard disk it introduced last fall, but it lists for $7,000 and probably isn't going to be high on many wish lists until the price comes down by at least 50 percent. HGST may be the furthest ahead of the group, since its 10TB helium drive came out in September 2014. Seagate is aiming the new drive at cloud-based data storage needs.
The 10TB HDD uses the standard 3.5-inch disk design and incorporates seven platters and 14 heads. Seagate said the drive features the industry's lowest power/TB ratio and weight specifications for a 10TB HDD. This breaks down to 25 percent more density to help businesses increase the number of petabytes per rack, the company said.

If anyone remembers the PC’s of the 1980’s it was common to have 10-40MB of hard drive storage available. My dad had an IBM PC/AT with a 20 MB hard drive which was "handed down" to me when I was in grade school. The drive currently sits disassembled in a box in my office. I checked the date on it and it was manufactured in June 1985! For comparison, this new drive represents a 1,000,000 times increase in storage capacity over the earliest hard drives.

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