Seagate updated their Enterprise Capacity line of HDDs this morning with a monster of a 10TB unit:

To achieve this capacity, Seagate switched over to a sealed, Helium filled design (similar to what HGST has been doing for a few years now). Since filling the space of a HDD with Helium helps reduce head flutter and platter thickness, Seagate was able to fit seven platters into a standard 3.5" housing. As an additional note, this drive uses the same PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) as other recent generation units, and not the SMR (Shingled) employed in their recent 8TB Archive HDD. PMR is a good thing here, as it enables random write access without the performance penalty incurred when attempting the same on an SMR drive.

The Helium filling pushes the MTBF up to 2.5 million hours. Unfortunately the release was light on the other details, and we do not have pricing as of yet, but we will certainly be keeping an eye on this one. Seagate states they are 'shipping to select customers', but given that those customers are ordering by the truckload, it may be some time before we see them in the OEM aftermarket channels.

Full press blast after the break.

Seagate Unveils 10TB Helium Enterprise Drive to Address Storage Demands of Cloud-Based Data Centers

New Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD Chosen by Global Enterprise Leaders Huawei and Alibaba for its High Capacity, Lower TCO

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today launched its first 10TB enterprise capacity hard disk drive (HDD), merging high capacity with the industry’s lowest power and weight available in a 10TB drive, to meet the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based data centers. The Seagate® Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD has been selected by enterprise market leaders globally for its ability to address storage demands unlike any other technology in the industry.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160113005043/en/

“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, 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.”

“With the amount of data today growing at an increasingly rapid rate, we are always on the lookout for storage solutions that offer better performance with lower overhead,” said Fan Ruiqi, president of storage products at Huawei. “The new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD from Seagate helps us meet these demands by offering incredible capacity with improvements in power and weight allowing us to drastically reduce our costs.”

The new, robust 10TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD provides maximum storage capacity for easy system integration by using the standard 3.5-inch CMR design. Incorporating seven platters and 14 heads, the drive seals in helium to create a turbulence-free, quiet environment, decreasing both friction and resistance on the platters and delivering the industry’s lowest power/TB ratio and weight specifications for a 10TB HDD. Offering 25 percent more density to help businesses dramatically increase petabytes per rack, the drive delivers higher performance and reduced power and weight.

“More and more data centers are being put into operation as a result of data growing at an exponential rate. With this in mind, we are laser focused on lowering our TCO and confident the new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD can help us with this endeavor,” said Li Shu, senior expert technical support for storage and research and development, at Alibaba. “We value the drives winning combination of higher storage capacities, increased performance and low power consumption— making it a win-win for both us and our customers.”

“At-scale data centers are faced with the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research vice president for hard disk drives. “Seagate’s new 10TB HDD for enterprise data centers is its first product to employ helium technology and will help data center customers to expand storage capacity economically.”

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD improves performance by using advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data center managers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly. Featuring Seagate’s PowerChoice™ technology, the drive helps businesses manage and reduce the ongoing costs associated with power and cooling during idle time, while Seagate’s PowerBalance™ feature helps optimize the IOPS/Watt for even more efficiency.

It delivers an improved MTBF of 2.5 million hours and provides consistent performance to customers in a 24×7 multi-drive environment. Enterprise ready, the SeagateEnterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is available in both a 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS interfaces.

The new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 10TB is now shipping to select customers worldwide. For more information on all Seagate products please visit www.seagate.com.