Data Backup Digest

The demand for large storage continues to grow in both the consumer and enterprise markets. Part of this demand comes from the popular cloud storage market, where vast amounts of space is required to handle the constant flow of data.

As such, Seagate Technology are introducing their first 10 TB hard drive, named the Seagate Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD. The drive has a standard 3.5-inch communications riser cable design, but it offers something special too. And not just the large amount of data it can hold. Notably, this drive has a helium chassis to reduce the noise and friction.

The first customers to be using the new Seagate drive will be Huawei, the networking and telecommunications enterprise based in China, and the e-commerce company Alibaba Group.

“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 at 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.”

Synergy Research Group recently published data to show that the demand for cloud services and their related technologies has grown by 28 percent in 2015, with a total market value of $110 billion. Structured and unstructured data has seen great growth, so paired alongside cloud computing expansion and the need for Seagate’s new drive is clear.

The total volume of the world’s digital data is doubling every two years, which is an incredible amount of data. With data being stored in mobiles, homes, cars and more, that figure will continue to grow; data is the lifeblood of our daily lives. According to a 2014 Digital Universe study from EMC and IMC, the world will reach 44 trillion gigabytes total storage by 2020.

Trendfocus, a data storage research firm, reported recently that 145 million hard disk drives and solid state drives with a total capacity of 143 exabytes were shipped in the third quarter of 2015 alone, led by Seagate and Western Digital.

Seagate’s new drive has seven platters and 14 heads which are sealed in helium, offering an environment free of turbulence and noise. They claim that this offers the lowest power-to-terabyte ratios and weight specifications that currently exist for any 10 TB hard drive on the market.

In order to allow users to dramatically increase perabytes per rack, the hard disk drive also provides 25 percent more storage density over a standard drive of the same capacity. Seagate also claim that the new drives come with an improved mean-time-between-failure rates of 2.5 million hours.

According to John Rydning, the research vice president for hard disk drives at the analyst firm IDC, the new drive will allow data centres to deal with “the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data” in a cost-effective way.

Currently available for select enterprise customers globally, the new 10 TB helium drive from Seagate is available in both 6 GB/second SATA and 12 GB/second SAS interfaces.