10 tetra byte hard disk drive of HGST will soon be available in data center servers.

HGST will soon launch its hard disk drive of 10 TB of storage space which will be used in data center servers near you!

The attendees at a recent Linux Foundation Vault trade show in Boston got a glance of  HGST's 10TB hard disk drives (HDD) which is being built by Western Digital subsidiary that was formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Though it looks like any ordinary hard disk drive it has a storage capacity of 10TB and has been built to serve the data storage at data center servers and not for ordinary PC. The drive is also known as 10TB SMR Helioseal HDD and as per some officials it was being built since September 2014 and would be launched by mid of 2015. A new device manipulation library "libzbc" was added to get access to these drives through Linux. A complete support for these drives to work in Linux is still under process.

10TB HelioSeal uses two new distinct technologies:

• HelioSeal technology- here disks are filled with Helium gas and sealed, this reduces the read-write head friction and also enables more disk platters to be packed in.
• Host-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)-  this is a bit complex technology. In traditional hard disk drives the writing to the disk is done by using overlapping magnetic tracks which run parallel to each other. Here the disk drive tracks are separated by a small gap to make sure new writes don't corrupt data.  Now lets see the concept of SMR: here wider tracks are written that partially overlap previously written tracks, which in turn look like roof shingles due to which it has got this name. The gaps are removed which enables 25% to 100% more data to be written on the same disk platter and hence SMR enables data densities as high as 3 trillion bits per square inch. So the basic principle which SMR follows is that the read heads "read" the narrow tracks whereas the "write" heads do the writing part on the broader bands.

HGST's 10TB hard disk drives uses 256MB bands. Hence whenever the data is either read or modified or rewritten it takes place on the same band if there is enough space and if there is no space then the drive would use a new band.  Due to this the 10TB HDD are having slower writing speeds. Hence HGST is awaiting for a suitable Operating system to support this SMR and Linux is the best possible server to support the SMR. Hence even if the hard disks drives are ready HGST also needs a suitable operating system to support this new technology of 10TB SMR Helioseal HDD. Due to all these factors it is taking HGST more time to launch the product in the market.

However, by end of second quarter of 2015 HGST plans to launch the 10TB HDD in  market though price has not been announced yet. The company promises a reasonable overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when compared to the cost incurred in power consumption, storage density and cooling bills because 10TB HDD uses lower power consumption, higher storage density and the overall cooling bills required is less.

Well  HGST's 10TB HDD seems to be the right answer for people requiring huge data storage, then would the cost matter much!!