HGST becomes first to introduce 10TB hard drive in 3.5" form factor

[Shawn Knight]

HGST on Tuesday announced half a dozen new products including the world’s first 10TB hard drive in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. To pull off this feat, the Western Digital company had to utilize a pair of newer drive technologies that you may be familiar with.

The as-yet unnamed 10TB drive uses shingled magnetic recording, a technology first announced last year that takes advantage of blank "guard space" between individual tracks in order to increase capacity without increasing the number of platters in a drive. It basically lays down tracks in an overlapping fashion like the shingles on a roof.

It does have a tradeoff, however, in that some rewriting still needs to occur – impacting overall performance just a bit. But for the types of enterprise users that’ll likely employ HGST’s new drive, that shouldn’t really matter much.

The other trick up HGST’s sleeve with the new drive is its HelioSeal technology. By removing the air inside a drive and replacing it with helium (then sealing it shut), HGST is able to reduce power consumption by 23 percent and lower operating temperatures by 4°C. What’s more, this allows them to stuff even more platters into a single drive chassis. 

The drive isn’t quite ready for sale just yet although HGST tells us they are currently sampling it with select clients. Once ready, however, it’ll be destined for cloud and cold storage applications.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/58010-hgst-becomes-first-to-introduce-10tb-hard-drive-in-35-form-factor.html

 

[Greg S]

And I remember when 30gb was a big deal.

 

[Misagt]

I still remember my 2gb HDD I was so excited... I'm feeling rather old right now.

 

[LNCPapa]

I remember working at Seagate in the assembly line back in the mid 90's and we were pumping out 1.6GB drives that were blowing my mind. I couldn't understand how anyone could use up that much data. Now I have the newest Michael Jackson (Xscape) album and it would completely fill up a drive that size coming in at 1.59GB. Here's to hoping that technology will keep increasing at an ever increasing pace.

 

[trparky]

That's a lot of porn. LOL

 

[Beast99]

That's a lot of porn. LOL

Not if you are watching 4K porn

 

[BlueDrake]

That's a lot of porn. LOL

Not if you are watching 4K porn

Must be hating the pixelated videos you end up finding then?

 

[wishgranter]

I still remember my 2gb HDD I was so excited... I'm feeling rather old right now.

Was starting with 240-260 MB drive, that has failed after 4-5 months, as a complete series of that drives was faulty.... remember wingcommander on 12 3,5 disk, as what the hell is it for a game :-D

 

[cliffordcooley]

Just think you can pick up flash drives for little to nothing, that out perform any of the 3.5" drives of the 90's. Looking at all the advancements in SSD, I can vividly see the end of HDD storage. It may take another 20 years but HDD will see end-of-life.

 

[NicktheWVAHick]

I remember using Stacker 3.0 on my DOS machine to transform a 500Mb HDD into a little over 1Gb. When I saw all those zeros in my PCTools interface I almost wet my pants.

 

[Emexrulsier]

I remember working at Seagate in the assembly line back in the mid 90's and we were pumping out 1.6GB drives that were blowing my mind. I couldn't understand how anyone could use up that much data. Now I have the newest Michael Jackson (Xscape) album and it would completely fill up a drive that size coming in at 1.59GB. Here's to hoping that technology will keep increasing at an ever increasing pace.

Yeah I remember when I was at school and bought a 1.3Gb harddrive but the receipt showed it as 13Gb and I took this receipt to school to show off that yeah I had a 13Gb harddrive . I think my first ever hardrive was 80Mb on the Amiga and that was huuuge compared to the the 800k floppy disks of its time.

 

[cliffordcooley]

I think my first ever hardrive was 80Mb on the Amiga and that was huuuge compared to the the 800k floppy disks of its time.

Another 20 years we may be referring to HDD's, the way we are floppies today.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

I remember servicing Winchester drive packs back in the day when I was a young techie that had a staggering 10MB capacity, were a miniscule 5.25" and cost a mere $1500 a piece.

 

[Kibaruk]

Just think you can pick up flash drives for little to nothing, that out perform any of the 3.5" drives of the 90's. Looking at all the advancements in SSD, I can vividly see the end of HDD storage. It may take another 20 years but HDD will see end-of-life.

I vividly doubt it, I vividly think it will hit a lot of limiting factors way before HDD start to see end-of-life. Specially now that we started looking at new multimedia display technology like 4k, now even with gimmicks into 8k. There are 1080p movies that easily hit the 20gb mark, without knowing a lot about it I'll just do the times 4 math, a single movie will easily be in the 80-120gb mark, now take it a bit farther with 8k... and so on, even nowaday games (And some old ones) go in the range of 20-30+gb.

Now that's a lot of storage needs for a newly integrated and low capacity still unreliable ssd technology (Ok, it works fine for most users and the benchmarks are great but there are still a lot of them who have problems on the start).

 

[cliffordcooley]

I vividly doubt it

You may be right. After reading your comment, I now realize how strongly people need HDD's. How could SSD's ever take over the market? You seem to have a strong desire to keep HDD's around, no matter how much ground SSD's cover in the next 10 years.

 

[tomkaten]

It's quite well established that SSDs won't push HDDs into obsolescence any time soon, since the lower fab processes decrease their reliability, so they're bound to hit a sweet spot at some point (in terms of price/reliability/capacity).

In other news, I still remember going out with a friend about two decades ago to buy some HDD's for our "insane" rigs. He got a 20 MB MFM 5-incher (donno how many even remember that technology, it was so small and light you could kill a man with it, see the pic), and I got myself a huge 40 MB Seagate IDE

 

[Kibaruk]

You may be right. After reading your comment, I now realize how strongly people need HDD's. How could SSD's ever take over the market? You seem to have a strong desire to keep HDD's around, no matter how much ground SSD's cover in the next 10 years.

I don't have any desire to keep anything around for anytime, it's simply how I see it, we will hit limiting factors beyond the size or hardware of SSDs way faster than we will see HDD dying.

I gave an example which I thought would be pretty clear, the size of current media and the one that is being stablished through time.

Disk space has been growing parallel or maybe a bit faster than current media but it will be soon hitting very heavy sizes and not just because the computer industry is going that way, but instead because streamlined media is, with televisions reaching further in formats to show with quality image.

By the time a 2tb SSD is both reliable and cheap it might start something, but by that time you'll probably fill one up pretty easily with a couple 8k movies. Maybe we will have more advanced external storage in other formats, or a new DD will appear, who knows. In the next 10 years a lot can happen, I simply don't imagine HDD dying anytime "soon".

 

[DjKraid]

And I remember when 30gb was a big deal.

I remember when 600Mb was epic...damn I feel old now...
Can't wait to get similar HDDs like this to the "normal" consumer market, would be nice to replace all the smaller HDDs with just one or two big ones.

 

[cliffordcooley]

By the time a 2tb SSD is both reliable and cheap it might start something, but by that time you'll probably fill one up pretty easily with a couple 8k movies.

I agree with most of what you said. Except for the 8K argument. That is assuming 8K becomes mainstream within the same time frame. 8K for the average consumer is overkill. I can see 4K becoming mainstream (with the exception of TV broadcasting) but not 8K. The average consumer will likely never have space for an 8K display unless the pixel density is absurdly high.

 

[SirGCal]

I could convert my 24TB (8x4T RZ2) server into 60TB!!! SWEET! Sign me up!

 

[RustyTech]

The average consumer will likely never have space for an 8K display unless the pixel density is absurdly high.

What? you talking about size of display and not having enough room on a desk?

 

[EClyde]

I remember working at Seagate in the assembly line back in the mid 90's and we were pumping out 1.6GB drives that were blowing my mind. I couldn't understand how anyone could use up that much data. Now I have the newest Michael Jackson (Xscape) album and it would completely fill up a drive that size coming in at 1.59GB. Here's to hoping that technology will keep increasing at an ever increasing pace.

" Now I have the newest Michael Jackson (Xscape) album" No accounting for taste is there?

 

[Opus]

And I remember when 30gb was a big deal.

And I remember 1GB was a big deal.

 

[Guest]

I had a 20mb mfm hdd partitioned in half for appz & games.
dos, qemm?? The board has sips?? for ram. I upgraded to a 105mb esdi hdd. It was a Micropolis brick!
Price wise I'm guessing this 10TB enterprise hdd will cost the same as my pricey original drives...

 

[Emexrulsier]

A little off topic of HDD but I remember buying a 4Mb stick of Ram for $1600