Western Digital shipping world's first 10TB hard drive

Renowned hard drive maker Western Digital is now shipping the world's first 10 terabyte (TB) hard drive in the HGST Ultrastar He10.

The He10 is a helium drive that features perpendicular magnetic recording and is said to provide the lowest power consumption per TB on the market (56% fewer watts/TB than competing helium HDDs). Additionally, it includes a five-year warranty and claims a 2.5 million mean-time-between-failures rating. I might be inclined to be skeptical of this figure, but WD's reputation precedes it, and my own WD drive has been going strong for more years than I can remember.

The drive is aimed at enterprise customers that run media and cloud-based application businesses among other outfits, so enthusiasts with large appetites won't be able to get their hands on it. Netflix sure seems excited about it: its director of content delivery architecture David Fullagar says, "We've been using the HGST HelioSeal drives for a long time and not only do they give us more capacity, they have contributed to a lower overall power envelope and higher storage density, which has allowed us to maximize our data footprint and create a network that is optimized for TCO."

Pricing is not yet known, but you can safely assume the He10 won't be cheap.