HGST’s helium-filled Ultrastar He10 is the first 10TB hard drive for common storage

Helium-filled hard drives have hit a new milestone with the first 10TB drive that uses conventional recording methods.

The Ultrastar He10, from Western Digital subsidiary HGST, is not the first 10TB helium drive. (That honor already went to HGST over the summer.) Still, it’s the only helium drive of this size to use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), which has been the standard recording technology for hard drives for the last decade.

HGST’s earlier 10TB drive used shingled magnetic recording (SMR), in which magnetic tracks overlap to increase capacity. The downside of SMR is that there’s very little guard space between tracks, so rewriting data becomes a much longer process as adjacent tracks may also need to be rewritten. For this reason, SMR is better-suited for cold storage, rather than routine recording.

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