Enterprise HDD 10TB: Seven Drive Lines and Their Part Numbers

Enterprise HDD 10TB part numbers, line by line

Many product lines meet at 10 TB, and that is what makes shopping by the capacity alone unreliable. It is the top column of the Exos 7E10 table and the last column of the Exos X14 row, so the same headline size can come from quite different ranges. Each line has its own strings.

WD's HC510 sheet prints wildcards rather than finished strings: in its model form, 10 stands for 10 TB and 08 for 8 TB, so the capacity sits in the middle of the number. The Toshiba row comes from an overview covering the MG09 series. We have not been able to read Toshiba's MG06 overview, so we say nothing about that line.

What a 10 TB enterprise drive costs on Amazon.co.uk

At the last price check, the table held 17 listings for enterprise-class drives in stock. Lowest price per TB at the last check: £25.64/TB. Prices are pounds sterling inc VAT.

Before pressing Buy on Amazon, copy the model number from the row and look for it in the part-number table above. The Recording column prints a technology only for a part number a maker document covers. Otherwise it says so, whatever the Amazon title claims.

Idle power at 10 TB: a 3.8 W spread across six lines

This spread covers the six lines whose sheets tie a figure to 10 TB. Between WD Gold at 8.3 W and the X10 hyperscale model at 4.5 W, that is 3.8 W for each drive. Run for 8,760 hours, it comes to about 33.3 kWh a year at idle. This is our sum on maker figures, and nothing about active load is in it. The sheets also label the number differently: Idle A average on the X10 and X16, idling average on the X14, average idle on the 7E10, plain idle on the two WD drives. Read the gap as a guide rather than a like-for-like measurement.

The MG09 is left out of that range. The figure available is the MG09 overview's active idle, typical, 3.30 W SATA and 3.76 W SAS, in one cell shared by the 12 TB and 10 TB models, so it is a group value and we do not print it as a 10 TB figure.

Helium or air: a 16 TB Gold idles below a 10 TB Gold

WD Gold shows the effect within one family. Its drive technology row marks 16 TB and 14 TB as helium, and 12 TB, 10 TB and 8 TB as air. Those helium models idle at 5.6 W, so the 10 TB air-filled Gold draws 2.7 W more than a larger drive in the same range.

Helium is the usual design at this size. The X10, X14 and X16 sheets all answer Yes on a helium sealed-drive row at 10 TB, WD's HC510 belongs to its helium-filled HC500 series, and the MG09 overview describes a nine-disk helium-sealed design for the series. WD's HC520 sheet gives the HC510 a seven-disk design, the generation before its own eight-disk 12 TB drive. Of the seven lines, only the 7E10 sheet makes no statement either way, so we make no claim for it.

Ratings and claims on the 10 TB sheets

• Exos X10, X14 and X16: 2,500,000 hours MTBF on their 10 TB models.
• Ultrastar DC HC510: 2.5M hours MTBF, the same rating in WD's notation.
• Exos 7E10: 2 million hours MTBF and 550TB per year across the family, half a million hours below the three X-series lines.
• WD Gold WD103KRYZ: 2,000,000 hours MTBF, projected.
• Toshiba MG09: 2,500,000 hours MTTF, a 0.35% annualised failure rate and 550 TB per year across the family. Toshiba's term is MTTF, not MTBF, so we keep the label as printed.

WD bills the HC510 as the industry's first 10 TB drive that is drop-in ready for any enterprise-capacity application or environment. That is WD's marketing line, and it tells you nothing about how it compares with an Exos. All of these numbers describe a design, not how a given used drive has been treated.

SAS-only view of 10 TB enterprise drives

Six of the seven lines above carry a SAS part at this size, with WD Gold the exception, so the wrong interface is an easy mistake here. On the X14 and X16 the SAS drive states the same idle as the SATA one, whilst on the X10 it adds 1 W. Find out what your controller or backplane accepts, then use this narrower list. It leaves out any row whose interface we could not read.

Listings in new condition, and Seagate's recertified 10 TB numbers

The new-condition table holds 13 listings from the same check.

Seagate's factory-recertified range has its own 10 TB numbers, ST10000NM000C, ST10000NM001C and ST10000NM002C, and its sheet states a 6-month limited warranty. None of them is among the strings at the top of this page, so they are the ones to look for if recertified is what you want. That sheet prints a non-recoverable read error rate of 1 sector per 10E14, where the X10 sheet prints 1 sector per 10E15. A used row on Amazon.co.uk is not evidence of Seagate's process on its own. For more on condition, see refurbished enterprise hard drives.