HITACHI 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 remain 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 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 car. Crazy.
For more tangible proof of that progress, look no further than Hitachi’s latest multiplatter 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 actually Hitachi’s thirdgeneration helium drive, but it’s worth revisiting what a funky feature this is.
Using helium in a hard drive bestows a number of advantages, the most obvious of which is gaseous density just one seventh 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 helps when you’re trying to cram more data on to a magnetic platter than ever before. Indeed, the fact that it took Hitachi six years of engineering work to get the first helium drive to market speaks volumes about the technical challenges involved.
SHINGLE FILE Still, if the helium bit isn’t new, the He10’s use of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology is. The shizzle here, in layman’s terms at least, involves the layering or overlapping of the recording tracks. 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 greater data density. How much greater? Well, say hello to the first 10TB hard drive.
As is often the case with new technologies, SMR has previously been problematical 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 CrystalMark, the He10 cranks out around 250MB/s for sequential reads.
At three minutes, 26 seconds, it’s also competitive with a SATA SSD in our real-world file compression test. The four minutes, 24 seconds it requires to complete the 30GB internal file copy metric is less impressive, however. But like all magnetic drives, the real downer compared to solid-state storage is 4K random access performance.
The He10 actually knocks out some reasonable 4K numbers for a magnetic drive, including 5.97MB/s writes in CrystalMark. That’s very nice for a magnetic drive and is probably due, at least in part, to the new Media Cache feature on the He series. This reserves cylinders to use as instant write buffers, which reduces head movement, which in turn makes for shorter average seek times.
Of course, it’s still a tiny fraction of the 100MB/s-plus even a half-decent SSD would achieve in the same benchmark. So don’t go thinking the He10 has ripped up the rule book. 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 surely as good as it currently gets. –JEREMY LAIRD