Today’s an exciting day for Seagate, marking another milestone for our industry-leading technology teams — the launch of our first helium drive, a 10TB enterprise-class hard disk drive.
Based on the 10th generation of our nearline product, this new 3.5-inch drive specifically targets the fast-growing cloud-based mega data centers — providing maximum storage capacity with the lowest power and weight.
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.
Our new robust 10TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD has already secured strong market acceptance from key customers including Huawei and Alibaba, among others — a testament to its ability to address the unique storage demands of cloud-based data centers. There is still no other storage technology that meets the needs of this large and unique market segment as well as HDDs. Read the press release to find out more.
