Seagate unveils its own 10TB helium-filled hard drive

Seagate, after a slightly embarrassing pause, has launched a 10-terabyte helium-filled enterprise-class 3.5-inch hard drive. The drives aren't yet commercially available-they're being sampled to both Alibaba and Huawei at the moment-but they'll probably be around 600/$800 when they eventually arrive.

This 10TB drive marks Seagate's first foray into helium-filled storage devices. The company's primary competitor, Western Digital/HGST, has been selling helium-filled drives since 2013.

While HGST was more than happy to share lots of details about its hermetically sealed helium-filled hard drives, Seagate, rather annoyingly, has only sent us a vague press release. Seagate's 10TB drive has seven platters-the same number as the 10TB HGST drive-and 14 heads. There's no word on spindle speed, but it's probably 7200RPM. The press release says that the new Seagate drive uses the company's PowerChoice tech to reduce power consumption, but falls short of actually providing some numbers. There are two versions of the drive: one with a 6Gb/s SATA interface, another with 12Gb/s SAS.

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