Seagate offers new 12 TB helium-filled data centre disk drive

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We learned today that Seagate is now offering a new 12 TB helium-filled data centre disk drive, catching up with Western Digital’s Ultrastar HE-12, and providing both SAS and SATA interfaces.

The new drive represents a refreshed update on the existing 10 TB Enterprise Capacity drive and comes in 10 and 12 TB storage capacities.

The new drive features a 256 MB cache compared to the prior 10 TB Enterprise Capacity drive’s 128 MB.

Additionally, the maximum sustained transfer rate goes up from the previous drive’s 194 MBps to 261 MBps.

Some of the newer features are:

  • 4.16 ms average latency
  • 550 TB workload performance
  • 6 Gbps SATA and 12 Gbps SAS interface options
  • 2.5 million hours MTBF
  • 24×7 use and five-year warranty
  • Encryption option
  • RR of full 24×7 operation (AFR) of 0.35 percent





As a second-generation enterprise capacity helium-filled drive, it has manufacturing and design improvements, such as a wider weld.

Seagate says the drive enables hyperscale customers to deploy over 10vPB of high-performance storage in a single 42U rack for the first time.

It claims the drive offers the lowest power consumption, with up to 21 percent improvement in IOPS/watt over similar 12 TB HDDs on the market.

The new drive also features the lowest weight in the industry. The comparison is with WD’s HGST Ultrastar 12 TB HelioSeal spinner.

It also claims the drive is rapidly deployable for maximum performance and energy efficiency for Open Compute Project (OCP) platforms.

If you are attending the OCP Summit 2017 today in Santa Clara, you can see the drive at Seagate’s booth (B7).

Select cloud service providers will get volume shipments of the drive for evaluation starting in the June quarter.

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