HGST has been known to break capacity barriers in the data storage industry. Now, the company is yet again setting a new milestone, with its introduction of the world’s very first enterprise-class 10TB 3.5-inch HDD.

Last year HGST made headlines when it finally launched its very first HelioSeal HDDs. HelioSeal technology is the company’s method of sealing HDDs in helium to improve performance. The 6TB helium-filled drives were the first HDDs to showcase a significant boost in storage capacity, about 40% more compared to the competition at the time.

The new 10TB HDD, based from its designation, will again feature HelioSeal tech. As with most of the latest heavy-capacity enterprise HDDs to hit the tech market this year, the new HDD also uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. HGST claims that the efficient combination of both HelioSeal and SMR technologies provide the new HDD unprecedented storage capacity, at a performance level and distribution cost that is feasible for mass production.

The official name for the new hard drive is yet to be revealed, however HGST did announce that it will be targeted towards cold storage, WORM type and active archive type data storage systems. The further lowered power consumption and improved storage capacity of the new HDD is advertised to be especially useful for data applications that require “efficient, accessible, long term retention.”

On the other side of the announcement, HGST have also started production and shipping of its latest Ultrastar 7K6000 HDD. The HDD will be available in 6TB capacity, and is the very last generation model of the company’s air-filled standard hard drives. Spec-wise, this 3.5-inch HDD is at least 30% more power efficient than the previous Ultrastar 7K4000, and jam packs 1.2 TB of storage space in each of its five disks.

Samples for the new HDDs are already available, though there are no announcements about its eventual mass production just yet.

This post originally appeared on VR World, the Asia-Pacific sister site of Bright Side of News*

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HGST has been known to break capacity barriers in the data storage industry. Now, the company is yet again setting a new milestone, with its introduction of the world’s very first enterprise-class 10TB 3.5-inch HDD.

Last year HGST made headlines when it finally launched its very first HelioSeal HDDs. HelioSeal technology is the company’s method of sealing HDDs in helium to improve performance. The 6TB helium-filled drives were the first HDDs to showcase a significant boost in storage capacity, about 40% more compared to the competition at the time.

The new 10TB HDD, based from its designation, will again feature HelioSeal tech. As with most of the latest heavy-capacity enterprise HDDs to hit the tech market this year, the new HDD also uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. HGST claims that the efficient combination of both HelioSeal and SMR technologies provide the new HDD unprecedented storage capacity, at a performance level and distribution cost that is feasible for mass production.

The official name for the new hard drive is yet to be revealed, however HGST did announce that it will be targeted towards cold storage, WORM type and active archive type data storage systems. The further lowered power consumption and improved storage capacity of the new HDD is advertised to be especially useful for data applications that require “efficient, accessible, long term retention.”

On the other side of the announcement, HGST have also started production and shipping of its latest Ultrastar 7K6000 HDD. The HDD will be available in 6TB capacity, and is the very last generation model of the company’s air-filled standard hard drives. Spec-wise, this 3.5-inch HDD is at least 30% more power efficient than the previous Ultrastar 7K4000, and jam packs 1.2 TB of storage space in each of its five disks.

Samples for the new HDDs are already available, though there are no announcements about its eventual mass production just yet.

The post HGST unveils the world’s first 10TB 3.5-inch HDD appeared first on VR World.

Storage company HGST demonstrated this weekend at the Flash Memory Summit 2014 in San Jose, California what it calls the “world’s fastest” SSD.

HGST’s new SSD uses a PCIe interface and delivers three million random read IOPS of 512 bytes and random read access times of 1.5ms. Latency was reportedly close to 1us. HGST says this performance is orders of magnitude faster than existing Flash based SSDs.

“The PCM SSD demonstration is a great example for how HGST sets the pace of the rapidly evolving storage industry,” said Steve Campbell, HGST’s Chief Technology Officer, in a release. “This technology is the result of several years of research and advanced development aimed at delivering new levels of acceleration for enterprise applications.”

According to HGST, the memory used in this SSD consists of proprietary Phase Change Memory (PCM) components built on a 45nm process with a capacity of 1 Gb. PCM memory exhibits faster read access times when compared to NAND Flash memory. In order to get such low latency speeds, HGST engineers worked with researchers from the University of California, San Diego to develop a new interface protocol and architecture

“Three million IOPs is exceptional, but that is not the most exciting part of the demonstration,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, HGST’s manager of Storage Architecture is quoted as saying in the press release.. “What is really exciting is to be able to deliver latencies close to 1us for small block random reads. This is something that just cannot be done with NAND Flash and current controller and interface technologies.”

Of course this technology is years, if not a decade away from trickling down to the consumer space. What is exciting though is that this kind of research will spur research and development competition in a market, as the storage market notoriously is, that teeters on a oligopoly.

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Seagate is finally catching up to their competition with the announcement of their 6TB drive that finally brings the company into the realm of drives over 5TB. Their competition, WDC launched the HGST 6TB enterprise drive with Helium all the way back in November. While I’m not sure what took Seagate so long, it may not bode well for the company that they’re so far behind in terms of capacity. There are a lot of reasons that we could suspect why it took Seagate so long, but nevertheless they are here.

Yes, this drive is a 3.5″ drive, which comes as no surprise to anyone that knows about drive capacities. All of the leading capacity drives start out as 3.5″ drives and eventually their technology enables higher 2.5″ drive capacities. This drive will come in SATA 6G and SAS 12G, each with four different flavors and four different capacities. There will be two standard models one with 4KN (advanced 4K formatting) and one with 512E and an SED model as well as an SED-FIPS model. There will also be 5TB, 4TB and 2TB capacities of this same updated enterprise model and all version of this drive will be shipping with 128 MB of cache.

All of these drives will be 7200 RPM and are rated at a 1.4M MTBF, which makes these drive relatively reliable even though Seagate’s reliability has been put into question as of late by multiple publications and even by some of our own experiences with their 2.5″ enterprise drives.

In terms of performance, the SATA6G (SATA 3.0) drives are expected to deliver a sustained sequential read speed of up to 216 MB/s while the SAS12G (SAS 12 Gbps) interface drives are expected to deliver an extra 10 MB/s at 226 MB/s of sustained sequential read speeds. Seagate claims that this is the fastest 6TB drive in the world and as a result that would explain why they didn’t necessarily launch as early as WDC did with their HGST drive. The drives latencies remain the same across the board with an average latency of 4.16 ms. Their power consumption is also expected to hover around 8w (SAS) and 7w (SATA) under average idle power and almost 12w (SAS) and 11w (SATA) under typical operating conditions with random reads.

The final retail price still hasn’t been released yet, but I would expect it to sell in excess of $400 per drive, probably closer to $500.

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