Hitachi HGST Ultrastar He10 HUH721010ALE604 10 TB

SATA

Proprietary gel architecture

Hitachi/HGST was the first helium HDD manufacturer on the market and is now rightfully the leader in this industry. The Ultrastar He10 uses the third generation of HelioSeal architecture, which relies on a proprietary disk sealing method. Instead of the controversial but increasingly popular "tiled" write, the drive relies on PMR and caching technologies in the old fashioned way to improve random write speeds. We came to test the older model with a capacity of 10 TB, which includes 7 plates and 14 heads, and the spindle speed is standard for this class at 7200 rpm. Connection options - SATA and SAS.

Unusual caching principle

The interesting things don’t end with gel architecture. Hitachi/HGST were the first to pull off an interesting trick with new caching technology. It consists of dividing the hard drive into small caching zones that retain data in the event of a power outage and allow the write heads to move less. This made it possible to more efficiently concatenate many small writes before sending the data to permanent storage. Profit: increased energy efficiency, increased reliability of data storage with increased speed of write operations. For example, when reading sequentially, it produces an average of 249 MB/s, although previously such speeds were the prerogative of 2.5-inch server hard drives with a spindle speed of 15,000 rpm such as Seagate Savvio. But during random access write-oriented operations, the disk shows variable results, but, to be fair, such tasks are rarely assigned to server servers.

SED and ISE support

Otherwise, the Ultrastar He10 is not very different from a standard server HDD: MTBF is 2.5 million hours, five-year warranty. The disk is also equipped with the functions Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) for self-encrypting data and Instant Secure Erase (ISE), which allows you to destroy all data on the disk with just one command when it is taken out of service. What's especially cool is that at the time of its release in 2016, the Ultrastar He10 was either expensive or very expensive. But since then a lot of water has passed under the bridge, the price has stabilized and now it is even at the level of the popular Seagate Exos and IronWolf series.