Western Digital launches 12TB and 14TB Helium filled hard drives
Western Digital launches 12TB and 14TB Helium filled hard drives
Western Digital has now launched 12TB and 14TB Helium filled hard drives, which will be available with both SAS and SATA versions for both consumer and enterprise users.
The new 12TB HGST (sub-brand of Western Digital) Ultrastar HE12 series drive has already started shipping, with eight drive platters that spin at 7200RPM to offer some fast read and write speeds for a mechanical drive.
14TB HGST Ultrastar drives will be shipping later this year using the same 8-platter design and RPM speeds but will offer larger capacities by using shingled magnetic recording. Both drives will feature 256MB of cache and 8ms seek read times and 8.6ms seek times for writes.
Shingled Magnetic Recording technology can be used to increase storage capacity by up to 25% by slightly overlapping newly written magnetic tracks. SMR technology will increase drive capacity but reduce the drives write speeds, making the drive less suitable to use cases which require lots of data writes.
In theory, Western Digital can use their Shingled Magnetic storage technology to increase their drive capacity further, though this will have a larger effect on the drive’s write speeds. This will allow drives that are up to 16TB in size to be manufactured, which is an insane storage capacity for an HDD.
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