Biggest ever: HGST debuts 14TB helium-filled HDD

Since the rise of solid state disks it's getting harder and harder to get excited about hard disks. It's a slow-moving field and it really feels like little progress has been made over the last decade or so. About the only thing that makes us want to write about HDDs these days are higher storage capacities, so here's a post about world's first 14TB HDD!

The new model was created by Western Digital's HGST unit, it's a helium-filled disk for the enterprise market. This HelioSeal HDD uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, it spins at 7200rpm, has 512MB cache, and promises write speeds of up to 233MB/s.

Pricing and availability is unknown. The 12TB edition, which was launched last year, is found online for about 499EUR.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), a global data storage technology and solutions leader, today announced that it is providing cloud and hyperscale data centers the capacity required by big data applications with the world’s first 14TB enterprise-class hard drive featuring host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. Western Digital’s HGST-branded Ultrastar® Hs14 delivers 40 percent more capacity and more than twice the sequential write performance of its SMR predecessor, enabling more economical and efficient capture of the growing volume and variety of data.

Ultrastar® Hs14The future is built on the insights and predictive power of big data. As data grows exponentially, storing it all in an affordable and accessible manner is an ongoing challenge for enterprise and cloud service data center operators. With a focus on total cost of ownership (TCO), the factors of capacity per rack, power consumption, cooling, maintenance, and acquisition cost are all paramount. To combat the big data challenge, Ultrastar Hs14 drives deliver unprecedented capacity leadership and online watt/TB power efficiency for extremely low TCO by harnessing two core complimentary technologies – fourth generation HelioSeal® technology, and second generation host-managed SMR – along with enterprise-class reliability. These mature, field-proven technologies provide the foundation for delivering efficient, quality and reliable performance required by cloud and hyperscale environments, perfect for ultra-dense scale-out storage systems running sequential write workloads. By utilizing SMR technology, Ultrastar Hs14 HDDs offer a 16 percent increase in capacity while keeping highly predictable, highly reliable performance.