HGST takes the next step to providing hard drives with larger capacities, starting to deliver the Ultrastar Archive HA10. The largest 3,5" drives so far came with 8 TB. In order to achieve this capacity, Seagate used Shingled Magnetic Recording, while HGST focussed on helium-filled internals called HelioSeal. Now HGST combined both technologies for their 10 TB Ultrastar Archive Ha10. This drive is already delivered to OEM customers and cloud providers.
According to the Ultrastar Archive HA10 data sheet, the discs rotate at 7200 RPM. This provides a 157 MB/s sustained read transfer rate. When writing, the sustained transfer rate significantly drops to only 68 MB/s. As an enterprise-class hard disk drive, HGST promises a two million hour mean time between failures (MTBF). It also comes with a limited five years warranty and 10-15 unrecoverable bit error rate (UER). The drive is equipped with either SAS 6Gb/s interface and 4k native sector size or with SATA 6 Gb/s interface with 4k native or 512-Byte emulated sector size options.
HGST emphasizes that this drive is not a drop-in replacement for existing enterprise HDDs but - like Seagate's SMR drive - rather designed for archiving purposes. HGST provides an SDK in order to facilitate Linux application development and implementation of new SMR command sets. The company also provides a form to see if applications or solutions qualify for the HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 program.
Pricing for the new drive is yet unknown. While the Seagate 8TB drive pricing is at around $280, the 8TB HGST drive costs about $680. So the 10 TB drive should not be expected to be cheaper than $800. While purchasing costs appear to be high, operations cost should be lower due to the reduced power consumption per TB which can also reduce the required amount of cooling in data centres, assuming a high number of drives in use. However for home use there are probably better alternatives to this drive. Combining two 6TB drives would provide higher speeds at a lower price.
