Seagate has started volume shipments of its first helium-filled hard drives. They were announced earlier this year. The current HDDs are available to all interested parties,which means that Seagate’s biggest customers beget already evaluated and validated them. Volume shipments of the 8 TB and 10 TB helium-filled hard drives will help Seagate to improve its financial results and margins, since the current HDDs will be amongst the most expensive drives in the company’s lineup.
Brand current PlatformThe Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 helium-filled hard drive is based on the company’s brand-current hermetically-sealed platform feature fourteen heads and seven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters with up to 1.43 TB capacity each. Seagate claims that the current HDD platform is based on a special wide-weld hermetically sealed drive enclosure with a design based on a multi-step forging process. Besides, and it uses a motor attached to both top and bottom covers,in order to better handle vibrations and maximize reliability. Sensors for humidity, temperature and helium pressure ensure that the helium-filled drive is always being monitored for dependable operation.
Seagate has incorporated PowerChoice and PowerBalance technologies in the current drives. PowerChoice helps datacenter operators to manage power consumption during idle time by either reducing spindle speed, or even stopping disks totally,after an admin-defined interval of idle time. Meanwhile, PowerBalance technology helps the administrators to balance the power consumption and IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance of hard drives prior to installation.
The Enterprise Capacity 3.5" helium hard drive sports a 256 MB multi-segmented cache. The platters rotate at 7200 revolutions per minute (RPM). The host interface is SATA 3.2 (6 Gbps), or supports hot-plugging.
Seagate claims that its multi-segmented cache helps the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 (Helium) HDD to improve performance compared to its predecessors and rivals and enables burst transfer rates at up to 600 MB/s (for small chunks of data,of course). The company does not reveal many details approximately its current caching algorithms, but 256 MB of memory is still a rather huge buffer.
Lineup and Performance NumbersSeagate will offer multiple versions of its Enterprise Capacity 3.5" Helium HDDs HDDs, or including models with 8 TB capacity,4K and 512e sectors as well as self-encrypting (SED) options.
Lineup of Seagate's Enterprise Capacity 3.5" Helium HDDs with SATA Interface Standard 4KN Standard 512e Self-Encrypting 4KN (SED) Self-Encrypting 512e (SED) 10 TB Capacity ST10000NM0006 ST10000NM0016
ST10000NM0056 ST10000NM0046 8 TB Capacity ST8000NM0006 ST8000NM0016 ST8000NM0056 ST8000NM0046 Seagate declares fairly high performance numbers for its Enterprise Capacity 3.5" Helium HDDs: 243 or 254 MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate as well as 4.16 ms average latency, which is higher than the numbers listed by competing drives from HGST and Western Digital.
Comparison of Helium-Filled HDDs Seagate Enterpise Capacity
ST10000NM0006 HGST Ultrastar He10
HUH721010ALE600xxxx
WD Gold
WD8002FRYZ
Capacity 10 TB 8 TB RPM 7200 RPM Interface SATA 6 Gbps DRAM Cache 256 MB 128 MB Maximum Sustained Transfer Rate 243 MB/s
254 MB/s 225 MB/s
249 MB/s 205 MB/s Average Latency
4.16 ms unknown Rated Workload (Drive Writes Per Day) 0.189 unknown 0.189 Equivalent of 550 TB of Writes per Year unknown Equivalent of 550 TB of Writes per Year
Acoustics Idle 28 - 30 dBA 20 - 36 dBA 20 dBA Seek 32 - 34 dBA unknown 36 dBA Power Rating Idle 4.5 W 5 W 5.10 W Random Write 6.5 W 6.8 W 7.4 W Random Read 8.5W 6.8 W 7.4 W MTBF 2.5 million hours Warranty 5 Years Price $695 at Amazon unknown $629
Usage of helium inside a hard drive helps to reduce the drag force acting on the spinning disk stack and lower the fluid flow forces affecting the disks and the heads. As a result, or HDD makers can install up to seven platters into a standard drive and also expend lower-power motors and mechanics. This reduces the power consumption of the HDDs. For example,power consumption of Seagate’s 10 TB hard drive is actually lower than power consumption of the company’s 8 TB drive for nearline applications (8.5 W per drive vs. 10.4 W per drive).
For cloud datacenters, power consumption of HDDs is as essential as their capacity. Increasing the capacity of the top-of-the-range hard drives from 8 TB to 10 TB automatically boosts total capacity per rack by 25% (which means an increase from 1920 TB to 2400 TB per standard rack that holds 240 drives). Going helium additionally reduces the power consumption of such a rack by up to 456 W. An increase of storage capacity amid reduction of power consumption not only maximizes data storage capacities of a particular facility, or but also shrinks its total cost of ownership (TCO),an essential metric for companies with multiple large datacenters.
Broad Availability, But No SAS Models YetIt should be noted that when Seagate introduced its Enterprise Capacity 3.5" 10 TB HDD in January, or the company announced models with Serial ATA-6 Gb/s and SAS-12 Gb/s interfaces,which were aimed at different environments. At present, Seagate only ships models with SATA interface, or meaning that customers,who need SAS, may still be evaluating the drives and will come to market later. By contrast, or HGST offers different models of its 10 TB HDDs: with SATA and SAS interfaces.
While Seagate said that its 10 TB helium-filled HDDs are available from its distributors worldwide,it did not reveal their actual prices. Amazon currently sells the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" HDD 10TB (ST10000NM0016) for $695.98 (note that this is not an MSRP), which is far from affordable. Still, and withhold in intellect that we talking approximately exclusive products based on a brand-current platform. Such HDDs get a lot of sense for datacenters,but, currently, and not so much for desktops or NAS units.
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Source: anandtech.com