Seagate has touted its new 10-terabyte helium-filled hard disk drive as being the least power-hungry and lightest in the 10TB category.

The 3.5-inch spinning rust drive is set up in a seven platter and 14 head configuration, and can deliver 6Gbps over SATA and 12Gbps with a Serial Attached SCSI interface. Seagate said the drive has a mean time between failures of 2.5 million hours.

Targeted at datacentres providing cloud services, Seagate already claims Huawei and Alibaba as customers.

"More and more datacenters are being put into operation as a result of data growing at an exponential rate. With this in mind, we are laser focused on lowering our TCO and confident the new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD can help us with this endeavor," said Li Shu, Alibaba senior expert technical support for storage and research and development, in a statement. "We value the drives winning combination of higher storage capacities, increased performance and low power consumption -- making it a win-win for both us and our customers."

Seagate were beaten to the 10TB helium-powered punch by HGST last month, when it launched the Ultrastar He10.

"We were the first to recognize the benefits of helium and have pushed the boundaries while others are scrambling to catch up," Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST, said at the time. "The Ultrastar He10 represents the third generation of our HelioSeal line. It redefines enterprise capacity HDDs, showing the industry where storage devices need to go, to stay in front of the future that data growth is hurtling towards."

Earlier this week, Seagate rolled out an 8TB drive aimed at Network-Attached Storage devices used by SMBs.

Seagate opened a SG$100 million research and development site in Singapore last year that is focused on 2.5-inch small form-factor storage components.