Just over a month. That is the time difference between the announcement of the first 10 TB hard drive by Western Digital, and Seagate's direct response. Like its rival, Seagate used helium to achieve such density, but according to the company, its new hard drive is more efficient, a critical factor in an enterprise environment that constantly seeks to reduce energy consumption in its data centers.
Solid-state drives continue to gain capacity as their cost drops, but they are still a bit far from the parameters required by the enterprise environment. The cloud is becoming increasingly large, which implies an enormous density per unit, a factor that only traditional hard drives can satisfy for now. Of course, we must say traditional while bending that word a bit. We will have to wait a while for the technology available in hard drives destined for data centers to make an appearance on our desktops at a reasonable price, but the two titans of the industry, Western Digital and Seagate, do not stop exchanging blows. Last December, Western Digital presented, through its subsidiary HGST, the first ten-terabyte hard drive with injected helium. And now, Seagate did exactly the same.
This is the first drive with that capacity for the company, and at the same time, its first design based on the use of helium, with a density seven times lower than that of air. This allowed Seagate to install a total of seven platters with 1.43 terabytes of capacity each, and a total of fourteen read/write heads within the classic 3.5-inch format. As if that were not enough, the new drive has two special modules to save energy, PowerChoice and PowerBalance. The first attacks consumption during idle periods, while the second enables administrators to apply a certain fine-tuning on the balance between consumption and performance, depending on each case.
Another fact to keep in mind is that Seagate anticipates a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours, the same value that Western Digital announced for its Ultrastar He10. The new Seagate drive will be available with SATA 6 Gb/s and SAS-12 interfaces, and the first evaluation units were destined for two of the company's main clients, the Chinese giants Huawei and Alibaba. Seagate still has to work on general availability, and the price per unit is unknown, but the simple fact of increasing capacity per rack and achieving greater energy efficiency per terabyte will surely make these drives a highly sought-after item.
