Western Digital Ships Monstrous 14TB Helium-Filled Enterprise Class Hard Drives

Western Digital Ships Monstrous 14TB Helium-Filled Enterprise Class Hard Drives

Western Digital is breaking out the big guns when it comes to enterprise-class hard drives, and this week the storage giant announced the HGST Ultrastar Hs14. Like its predecessor, the Hs14 takes advantage of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, however, it offers 40 percent more capacity and twice the sequential write performance.

In addition, the Hs14 is claimed to have 60 percent lower idle watts per terabyte than 8TB hard drives that are filled with air (instead of helium). While performance is no doubt important, the spec that most people will be focusing in on, of course, is its capacity. The Ultrastar Hs14 delivers here, bringing 14TB of storage space to the table. According to Western Digital, this is the highest-capacity hard drive for the enterprise market.

“Over 70 percent of the exabytes Western Digital ships into the capacity enterprise segment are on helium-based high-capacity drives and continue to support customers with outstanding reliability, performance and value Quality of Service (QoS),” said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. “The TCO and reliability benefits of our HelioSeal platform are the foundation of our leadership in high-capacity enterprise storage.”

Western Digital is really stressing reliability with the Ultrastar Hs14, and boats of a 2.5 million-hour MTBF rating for the hard drive. In addition, it comes backed with a 5-year limited warranty. The Ultrastar Hs14 is currently sampling to Western Digital's premier OEM partners, and according to the product page for the hard drive, it will be available in both SATA (6Gb/s) and SAS (12Gb/s) SKUs.

We should note that rival Toshiba made it clear in early September that its own 14TB helium-filled hard drives would be available "very soon". More specifically, the company noted that the drives would be available by the end of 2017, which means sometime during the current quarter.

Seagate, on the other hand, is pushing to release 14TB and 16TB hard drives during 2018. It will reportedly cross the 20TB threshold in 2020.

 

SMR... )'= Still, me wantz! Oh, ffs, it's a host-managed SMR, not drive-managed.

 

Yes it is, and there are many technologies coming from other brands like this and maybe more efficient, this is only the start.

 

@Dr. AMK it's very sad they didn't make it host-aware, regardless.

 

Maybe the next step, or it will be in different models.

 

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology increases the areal density of hard disk drives. Among the three types of SMR drives on the market today, Host Aware SMR (HA-SMR) drives look the most promising. some companies are doing evaluation to understand the performance of HA-SMR drives with the objective of building large-scale storage systems using this type of drive. They will focus on evaluating the special features of HA-SMR drives, such as the open zone issue and media cache cleaning efficiency. They will propose a novel host-controlled indirection buffer to enhance the drive’s I/O performance.

 

Fast-moving spinning magnetized nanoparticles could lead to ultra-high-speed, high-density data storage

 

Looks super cool actually!

Can't wait for more of those to reach the actual customer market!

 

I don't know if this is a normal something, but you can buy a 10 TB HDD in Romania now. it is not very expensive, around 350$ or so. WD something something servers.

 

The WD 10TB you mentioned is available in all markets, the WD Monstrous 14TB Helium-Filled Enterprise Class Hard Drives is a completely different technology targeting the enterprise sector, it's not only the size it's about durability and performance, more speed with less power consumption.

 

Oh, I see now!

Can't wait to see it coming to the consumer sector eventually!

I'd love to see more high quality components entering from the enterprise to the consumer sector.

 

I'm sure it'll come eventually given that any 14TB consumer drive will need better resilience as it'll have finally exceeded the 10^14 unrecoverable error rate - but by then the enterprise sector will have 20TB drives utilizing some next-gen technology that we can't wait for once again

 

Yes it will never end .