To date, the highest storage volume for commercially available hard drives is 10 terabytes. HGST, Seagate and Western Digital HDDs with 10 terabytes are now on the market, Toshiba is still missing such a model.
10 TB hard drives
To enable 10 terabytes of storage space, the hard disk manufacturers rely on the noble gas helium, which replaces conventional air as a filler. The lower density of helium allows more magnetic disks to be accommodated in the same format and also offers advantages in terms of energy consumption.
ComputerBase was able to confirm the efficiency advantages of helium during the test of the HGST Ultrastar He8. Now the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 10TB is the second helium hard drive on the test course. As the long product name reveals, it is an enterprise model that is primarily used in servers. In addition to the high capacity, the specifications promise low power consumption and fast transfer rates.
The beginnings of the 10 TB era
About a year ago, the HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10, the first hard disk with a storage volume of 10 terabytes, came onto the market. Previously, 8 terabytes were the maximum for HDDs. However, the debutant has a technical disadvantage: the use of the Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) recording technology increases the data density, but ensures low transfer rates when rewritten.
In December, HGST finally followed the Ultrastar He10, the world’s first 10 TB HDD with proven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) instead of SMR. Just about a month later, Seagate countered with the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 10TB, which also uses PMR instead of SMR. In addition to the models from the HGST subsidiary brand, Western Digital now also has a 10 TB HDD under its own name in its range: the WD Gold 10TB for the server market.
On the next page: Technology at a glance
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