Helium-Filled 10TB Hard Drive Announced

While the 10TB drive is not going to be on the market for a few months yet, WD also has a helium-filled 8TB Ultrastar He8 drive that’s being “qualified by Netflix, Promise, and “other top OEMs and cloud customers around the world.”
The He8 uses seven big platters of 1.2 TB each, in respects is no different from the earlier He6 6TB or for that matter the upcoming He10 10TB models. I would imagine that this is the drive that WD is pitching against Seagate’s own 8TB drive.

Finally, WD is currently shipping a standard air-filled 6TB drive, the Ultrastar 7K6000. This drive has just five platters, of 1.2TB. This makes Western Digital the “areal density leader” apparently, implying that Seagate has not yet discovered the secret to producing drives with 1.2TB platters.

Again there is no concrete pricing structure. The air-filled Ultrastar 7K6000 should start around $400. The original helium-filled 6TB Ultrastar He6 is now down to around $500. But there’s no price yet on the 8TB Ultrastar He8, but you are going to be looking at around $1,000 .

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[Image via computerbase]

SOURCE: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/189813-western-digital-unveils-worlds-first-10tb-hard-drive-helium-filled-shingled-recording