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ultrastar-hs14

You might recall a time non that long ago that a 1TB hard bulldoze was considered gigantic. How far nosotros've come. Western Digital has started shipping its newest and largest hard bulldoze, the HGST Ultrastar Hs14. As the name suggests, this bulldoze has a whopping 14TB of space. Not only that, it's faster and more efficient than the 12TB drives Western Digital started shipping last year.

Like many super-loftier-capacity spinning drives, this device is filled with helium. The atmosphere in an SSD doesn't affair because there are no moving parts, just ensuring the platters in a spinning drive (7200RPM in this case) can motion smoothly is essential in high-density data storage. Helium creates less drag on the platters than regular air, so drives similar the HGST Ultrastar Hs14 are hermetically sealed and filled with an atmosphere of helium. HGST (which is part of Western Digital) calls this "HelioSeal" engineering science.

This bulldoze uses SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) on eight platters to reach this incredible capacity. Rather than beingness next to each other, the bulldoze tracks are overlapping each other like shingles. That results in higher areal density. There'south more going on within this drive than older drives, merely HGST says it's more efficient, consuming but 5.2W at idle and 6.2W during performance. That's technically a bit more the older 8TB helium drives from HGST, merely it'due south 60 percent less when you compare the wattage per terabyte.

You can get the Hs14 in both SATA and SAS configurations; the sometime supports standard 6Gbps information speeds and the SAS version can do 12Gbps. Both drives take 512MB of information buffer and a sustained transfer rate of 233Mbps.

The Hs14 is designed to run 24/seven for at least 2.five one thousand thousand hours, making it ideal for enterprise and server applications. Not only will the price be exterior the realm of consumer drives, information technology's a host-managed device. Thus, you probably wouldn't want to mess around with the HGST Ultrastar Hs14 even if you could afford i. Some of your information might end up on the Hs14, but just if a company uses them in a data middle where your bits happen to exist. Give it a few years, and this technology volition probably trickle down into the more than consumer-friendly Western Digital drives.

This is the current leader when it comes to storing a ton of data, but information technology might non be in the atomic number 82 for long. Seagate has said it plans to launch a 16TB helium-filled drive in 2018. That could be followed up with a 20TB drive in 2020.

Now read: How do SSDs work?