HGST Launches 10TB Drive for Users With Deep Archive Needs

Raising the bar yet again on the maximum capacity of a single hard drive, HGST, a Western Digital company, announced an enterprise-class HelioSeal 10TB hard drive aimed at applications with deep archive needs.

The new Ultrastar Archive Ha10 drive is the company's third helium-based drive. HGST says it uses the second generation HelioSeal platform and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to achieve maximum density.

HGST believes host-managed SMR as core technology is the future for its HelioSeal line, with greater density achieved in the same footprint through overlapping, or "shingling" the data tracks on top of each other. After previewing the 10TB drive last year HGST says customer feedback revealed that active archive applications are already sequential, creating the ideal environment for SMR hard drives to thrive. The company also estimates that active archive/deep archive applications are generating 20-35 percent of the data being stored today.

"By layering SMR on top of helium, we are enabling massively scalable TCO-driven storage solutions with the performance and durability necessary for the long-term retention of archived data," Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST, said in a statement. "Making SMR design investments today minimizes incremental efforts for future SMR solutions and gives our customers a time-to-market advantage for all current and future high-capacity HDDs in the market."

With a 5-year warranty and 2,000,000-hour MTBF (mean time between failures), HGST positions the drive as purpose-built for cloud providers, online backup providers, and others with deep archive needs where data is only read occasionally.

HGST says it is working with driver vendors for HBA support, and will provide an open source Software Development Kit for Linux application development. The company says roll-out of the Ha10 will initially focus on cloud and OEM storage customers.