Seagate joins HGST with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

Seagate has confirmed that it is taking a leaf out of rival HGST's book and filling its high-capacity drives with helium, starting with its first 10TB enterprise-grade model.

Fresh from announcing a 8TB NAS-centric drive, Seagate has joined the double-figure terabyte club with a new enterprise-grade drive - and, unlike its cheap Archive models, using traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) techniques rather than the new and largely unproven shingled magnetic recording (SMR). The trick? Replacing the air within the drive with helium to reduce friction and improve heat transfer.

If that sounds familiar, it should: Western Digital subsidiary HGST announced the first prototype implementation of helium-filled drives in September 2012, releasing the first commercial 6TB version in November 2013. This was followed by sampling of a 10TB HelioSeal drive a year later, which finally hit the market in December last year.

Now, a month late to the party, Seagate's own helium-filled 10TB drive offers some competition in the high-capacity high-performance market. The company is quick to point out its advantages over the rival drive, too, including the company's PowerChoice and PowerBalance technologies for reducing power draw during idle and operating states.

Seagate is launching the drive in 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS interface flavours, though is presently only sampling to selected customers with no news on general availability nor - crucially - price.