Helping the world harness the power of data, HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the first enterprise-class 10TB (terabyte) hard disk drive (HDD) for next-generation active archive applications. The host-managed Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR HDD sets a new standard in enabling the world's densest server and storage systems with unprecedented TCO levels. This industry-defining product is the result of combining two complementary technologies - HGST's second generation, field-proven HelioSeal platform and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) - to deliver unmatched storage density and power efficiency, without compromising reliability and performance predictability. With an industry-leading 10TB capacity, the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 gives customers a time-to-market capacity advantage for archival environments and applications where data is sequentially written and randomly read, such as social media, cloud storage, online backup, life sciences as well as media and entertainment.

HGST recognizes SMR as core technology necessary in driving areal density increases. By overlapping or "shingling" the data tracks on top of each other, higher areal density can be achieved within the same physical footprint. Based on feedback from customers whose data center environments demand predictable performance and control of how data is handled, HGST has implemented a host-managed SMR solution. The sequential write behavior of host-managed SMR complements active archive workloads.Today, many hyperscale cloud providers are discovering that most of their active archive applications are already sequential, creating the ideal environment for SMR HDDs to thrive. The capacity enterprise HDD market is adapting to this shift, creating demand for purpose built drives, making the Ha10 an ideal solution due to its capacity, data integrity and desired predictable performance. Currently, HGST estimates that active archive/deep archive applications are generating 20-35 percent of the data being stored today. Based on current customer data, HGST is projecting that this statistic will grow to more than 50 percent in the next five years.

Extending Leadership
The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 is the third of HGST's helium-based HDDs launched in less than two years. It underscores the sustainability, applicability, and success of its HelioSeal technology with well over one million units deployed to date. HGST continues to address data growth and long-term data retention by investing in a multi-generational path of SMR-based HDDs with HelioSeal. The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 and its subsequent SMR-based successors will consistently deliver the highest capacity with the lowest TCO.

Based on the proven HelioSeal platform, the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 leads the market in reliability and data integrity for active archive applications. The drive is rated at two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF), offers a five-year limited warranty, a 10-15 unrecoverable reduced bit error rate, rotational vibration safeguards, and 600K load/unload cycles, making it the optimal enterprise-class solution for active archive workloads. Customers who are driven by the capacity, performance and low TCO are already capitalizing on value of the Ha10 HDD.

"We are in the era of data explosion, which has brought huge challenges to massive data management with increasing data storage costs and demand for instant access to all data," said Yuan Yuan, Vice President, IT Storage Product Line, Huawei. "Huawei is pleased to see the launch of HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 with 10TB single drive capacity and its application in Huawei's OceanStor storage system. Huawei will continue cooperating with its partners in innovative technology development and applications so as to help customers tackle various challenges posed by massive data management."

"As Europe's leading cloud service provider, our growth has been unprecedented. Our ability to scale efficiently, quickly, and smartly is premised on innovative products and technologies that are right-sized for a compute and storage-rich environment," said Miroslaw Klaba, vice president of research and development, OVH. "We have identified both HelioSeal and host-managed SMR as two cornerstone recording technologies that provide a transformational means to our datacenter deployment and service offerings. We continue to partner with HGST on solutions that put us on an accelerated path for PB-scale deployment at low TCO."

The New Era of Capacity Enterprise Storage
The Ultrastar Archive Ha10 underscores HGST's overall strategy to motivate the market with innovative solutions that enrich the partner ecosystem and better elevate software solutions in the storage stack.

"HGST's helium-filled drives boast industry-leading storage density, low power consumption and proven reliability with 2.5M hours MTBF. By layering SMR on top of helium, we are enabling massively-scalable, TCO-driven storage solutions with the performance and durability necessary for the long term retention of archived data," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. "Making SMR design investments today minimizes incremental efforts for future SMR solutions, and gives our customers a time-to-market advantage for all current and future high capacity HDDs in the market."

Initial rollout of the 10TB HDD is focused on cloud and OEM storage customers who have the in-house capability to develop the software required. To benefit from the value proposition of Ultrastar Archive Ha10, host applications need to be first sequentialized, which requires adjustments in the software stack to take advantage of the areal density gain, and consequently, the sequential write behavior of host-managed SMR. This not only ensures the predictable performance that enterprise and cloud customers have come to expect, but also provides maximum control and arbitration at the host system level, which customers prefer.


HGST's activities with the Open Source community will also help accelerate adoption for channel customers and white-box system builders, based on Linux and other select open source OS. HGST is providing an Open Source Software Development Kit (SDK) known as "libzbc" to facilitate Linux application development and implementation of new SMR command sets.