The Seagate 10TB Helium Enterprise Drive

Cupertino, California – January 13, 2016

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today launched its first 10TB enterprise capacity hard disk drive (HDD), merging high capacity with the industry’s lowest power and weight available in a 10TB drive, to meet the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based data centers. The Seagate^® Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD has been selected by enterprise market leaders globally for its ability to address storage demands unlike any other technology in the industry.

Helium — Why Now?

Seagate’s strategy around helium has been a subject of discussion for some time now; considering Seagate’s longstanding technology innovation leadership, some have wondered why we did not leverage it sooner. While others rushed to market with 6TB- and 8TB- based helium products, we were able to leverage our existing technology to offer the same capacity air drives at much lower costs.

Using helium, we’re now able to pack as many as seven disks into the 3.5-inch form factor and thus deliver the industry’s lowest power and weight, without sacrificing performance. This results in an optimum total cost of ownership for cloud-based data centers, since the higher cost of helium is offset by the savings from lower power usage and weight.

How to get it right — clear technical advantages

Today’s launch also shows the importance of getting it right, with a product that delivers clear technical advantages. Seagate’s helium technology leverages 20 years of sealed-drive design. We are using technology innovations that make our drive more robustly sealed. Digital-environmental sensors improve reliability by measuring humidity, pressure and temperature inside the drive, and our hermetic-interconnect technology enables higher-data-rate heads and higher pin counts.

Cloud-based exabytes are expected to reach 60 percent of the data center market by 2020. The 10TB helium drive is perfect for this space and an important step in our strategy to build a broad and flexible product portfolio. As data complexity grows, user requirements are also becoming ever more diverse. We have seen how certain customers in cloud-based data centers are increasingly focused on reducing weight and power. Other customers continue to seek solutions that optimize cost balanced with performance. With our mix of helium and air drives, we now offer a comprehensive set of customer-driven solutions to a broader-than-ever range of users, in new as well as traditional customer spaces.

Addressing Storage Demands Of Cloud-Based Data Centers

“Cloud-based data center storage needs are expanding faster than many current infrastructures can sustain, rendering the capacity demands of users a herculean task for cloud managers,” said Mark Re, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Seagate. “Built on our years of research and development of sealed-drive technology, our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organizations worldwide solve the needs of their growing storage business.”

“With the amount of data today growing at an increasingly rapid rate, we are always on the lookout for storage solutions that offer better performance with lower overhead,” said Fan Ruiqi, president of storage products at Huawei. “The new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD from Seagate helps us meet these demands by offering incredible capacity with improvements in power and weight allowing us to drastically reduce our costs.”

The new, robust 10TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD provides maximum storage capacity for easy system integration by using the standard 3.5-inch CMR design. Incorporating seven platters and 14 heads, the drive seals in helium to create a turbulence-free, quiet environment, decreasing both friction and resistance on the platters and delivering the industry’s lowest power/TB ratio and weight specifications for a 10TB HDD. Offering 25 percent more density to help businesses dramatically increase petabytes per rack, the drive delivers higher performance and reduced power and weight.

“More and more data centers are being put into operation as a result of data growing at an exponential rate. With this in mind, we are laser focused on lowering our TCO and confident the new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD can help us with this endeavor,” said Li Shu, senior expert technical support for storage and research and development, at Alibaba. “We value the drives winning combination of higher storage capacities, increased performance and low power consumption— making it a win-win for both us and our customers.”

“At-scale data centers are faced with the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s new 10TB HDD for enterprise data centers is its first product to employ helium technology and will help data center customers to expand storage capacity economically.”

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD improves performance by using advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data center managers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly. Featuring Seagate’s PowerChoice™ technology, the drive helps businesses manage and reduce the ongoing costs associated with power and cooling during idle time, while Seagate’s PowerBalance™ feature helps optimize the IOPS/Watt for even more efficiency.

It delivers an improved MTBF of 2.5 million hours and provides consistent performance to customers in a 24×7 multi-drive environment. Enterprise ready, the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is available in both a 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS interfaces.

The new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 10TB is now shipping to select customers worldwide. For more information on all Seagate products please visit www.seagate.com.

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