Last week at the OCP Summit, Seagate announced that its new 12TB helium enterprise drives are shipping to cloud providers for evaluation, with volume shipments to start in the June quarter of 2017.

The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 12TB is engineered to accommodate 550TB workloads annually. It has a market leading MTBF (mean time between failure) of 2.5 million hours and is designed to operate 24/7 for five years in enterprise data center environments.

The new drive uses eight platters, which is more than the first generation model, but its power consumption remains below typical air-filled HDDs. The HDD features 16 heads, and rotates at 7200 RPM. Cache is listed as 256 MB for each drive. Due to higher areal density and some other optimizations, the new-gen enterprise HDDs have up to a 261 MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate, which is a little bit higher than the helium-filled drives introduced last year.

Seagate says that new firmware and hardware improvements to the new helium-filled hard drives include a 50 percent higher capacity; 21 percent increase in IOPs performance/watt; and 20 percent increase in enhanced caching performance, which results in faster access to unstructured data.

The family of Seagate's 12 TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDDs includes 12 models with SATA 6 Gb/s or SAS-12 Gb/s interfaces, 4Kn or 512e sectors, self-encrypted drives (SEDs) as well as SED-FIPS HDDs. All of the hard drives are rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and come with a five-year warranty.