Hitachi Ultrastar He10 10TB
Hitachi crams the population of China into a small family car. Kinda...
In this brave new solid-state era, it’s easy to forget that magnetic drives still do the heavy lifting when it comes to mass storage. SSD prices may have tumbled, but multiple terabytes of solid-state storage remains super expensive.
It’s also easy to overlook the remarkable technical innovation that underpins the relentless increase in data density offered by the latest magnetic drives. To get an idea of the progress that’s been achieved over recent decades, here’s a nice analogy we just shamelessly stole off the internet. If cars had improved their cabin space since the early 1980s at the same rate that hard drives have increased data capacity, you’d be able to cram the entire population of China into a small family sedan. Crazy.
For more tangible proof of that progress, however, look no further than Hitachi’s latest multi-platter masterwork, the Ultrastar He10. As implied by the ‘He’ branding, one of the drive’s defining features is the use of helium inside a hermetically sealed enclosure. This is Hitachi’s third-gen helium drive.
Using helium bestows a number of advantages, the most obvious of which is gaseous density just oneseventh that of air. That makes for less drag acting on hard drive platters. With less drag, the motor needs less power and the fluid flow forces buffeting the platters and arms are reduced. Every little bit helps when you’re trying to cram more data onto a magnetic platter than ever before.
The He10’s use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology is new. The shizzle here, in layman’s terms, involves the layering or overlapping of the recording tracks. As the name suggest, think of the tracks as arranged like an overlapping shingled roof rather than tiles arranged edge-to-edge, thus allowing more tracks in the same surface area and, in turn, greater data density. How much greater? Say hello to 10TB of space, baby.
As is often the case with new tech, SMR has been problematic from a performance perspective. But with claimed sequential performance numbers in excess of 200MB/s from this 7,200rpm drive, that’s something Hitachi seems to have solved. Our benchmark results paint a similar picture. In both ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark, the He10 cranks out around 250MB/s for both sequential reads and writes.
At 3 minutes, 26 seconds, it’s competitive with a SATA SSD in our real-world file compression test. The 4 minutes, 24 seconds it requires to complete the 30GB internal file copy metric is less impressive. But like all magnetic drives, the real downer compared to solid-state storage is 4K random access performance.
The He10, knocks out reasonable 4K numbers for a magnetic drive, such as 5.97MB/s writes in CrystalDiskMark. That’s probably due, at least in part, to the new Media Cache feature on the He series. Media Cache reserves cylinders to use as instant write buffers. This reduces head movement, which makes for shorter average seek times.
It’s still a tiny fraction of the +100MB/s a half decent SSD would achieve in the same benchmark. SSDs remain by far the better bet for performance. But if you want a lot of storage in a single drive and can handle the hefty price, this is a great option if you need lots of gigs.