Seagate has introduced its second-generation of helium-filled HDDs. These drives will be aimed at capacity-demanding enterprise and cloud applications, and the new drives store up to 12 TB of data. The new drive uses eight platters, which is more than the first generation model, but its power consumption remains below typical air-filled HDDs.
Traditionally such drives have more robust mounting mechanisms for internal components anyway, such as the motor, and various vibration and environmental sensors to guarantee predictable performance and reduce risks.
In addition, the new HDDs support PowerChoice technology that helps to manage idle power consumption. The new PowerBalance tech enables operators of datacenters to balance power consumption and IOPS performance of the hard drives.
The new Enterprise Capacity v7 3.5-inch 12 TB HDD has eight perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters, each with a 1.5 TB capacity. This comes with 16 heads, and rotates at 7200 RPM. Cache is listed as 256 MB for each drive.
