HGST Releases Mammoth 10TB Ultrastar Archive Ha10 Enterprise Hard Drive

HGST has just announced the release of the world’s first 10TB enterprise hard drive, which it calls Ultrastar Archive Ha¹⁰. Sharing a similar design as the company’s Ultrastar He⁶ and He⁸ drives, the Ha¹⁰ takes advantage of HGST’s helium-based tech, HelioSeal, as well as SMR, shingled magnetic recording, to enable it to achieve the impressive areal density that it has.

Given the “Archive” in its name, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and think that this drive isn’t that fast, but it’s really not so bad. It boasts a standard rotational speed of 7,200, and peaks at 157 MB/s read and 68 MB/s write. For latency, it’s spec’d at 8.5 ms, which again is pretty standard.

One of the things I find most interesting about this drive is something that HGST doesn’t go out of its way to highlight: it’s the first mechanical drive to feature a 256MB cache. Even 128MB caches are rare, despite Seagate having had one a few years ago, so 256MB is quite impressive to see.

Nonetheless, HGST doesn’t give us pricing on these drives, but considering the He⁸ costs about $600, I’d expect this 10TB model to tack on a few hundred dollars as a premium. After all, it is the highest-density mechanical drive available for purchase.

I can’t wait to see such densities hit the consumer side.