Western Digital starts shipping the world's first 14TB hard drive

[midian182]

Many component manufacturers compete to see who can release the fastest/smallest/largest technologies first, and the hard drive industry is no different. In January, Seagate announced it is bringing 14TB and 16TB HDDs to market within the next 18 months, but Western Digital has beaten its rival to the punch by launching the world’s first 14TB hard drive.

Like other drives that feature massive capacities, the HGST Ultrastar Hs14 is filled with helium instead of regular air, which means less drag on the platters. It features 4^th generation HelioSeal technology and uses 2nd-generation host-managed SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) on eight platters to hit that huge capacity.

HGST says the drive consumes just 5.2W at idle and 6.2W during operation. That works out at 60 percent lower idle watts per TB than an 8TB air-filled drive. It’s available in SATA (6Gbps) and SAS (12Gbps) models, and has a claimed 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures).

"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, Western Digital’s senior vice president of devices. "The TCO and reliability benefits of our HelioSeal platform are the foundation of our leadership in high-capacity enterprise storage."

While it’s true that PC game installs are getting bigger, these drives are aimed at enterprise customers such as cloud and hyperscale data centers, rather than regular consumers. No word yet on price, but expect it to be expensive.

The Hs14 is currently shipping to select OEMs and comes with a five-year limited warranty.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/71272-western-digital-starts-shipping-world-first-14tb-hard.html

 

[Puiu]

I like how you said "most" and not all

 

[amstech]

I am done with spinners but that's one damn big drive.

 

[mojorisin23]

Still with non SSD drives? what year is this? 2002?

 

[Kris95]

Still with non SSD drives? what year is this? 2002?

Are there some 14TB SSDs out there I don't know about? Traditional hard drives have vastly more capacity and are much more affordable. Storage space will always win out over speed for certain uses. Use an SSD for your boot drive and OS. I'm not going to back up 8TB of data on an SSD though, that would be stupid.

 

[mojorisin23]

Are there some 14TB SSDs out there I don't know about? Traditional hard drives have vastly more capacity and are much more affordable. Storage space will always win out over speed for certain uses. Use an SSD for your boot drive and OS. I'm not going to back up 8TB of data on an SSD though, that would be stupid.

who needs 14 gb?? gimme a break... that is "needed' by perhaps .1% of the computing population.

1 gb SSD and youre good to go, believe me. If you need more get an external portable drive.

 

[Kris95]

who needs 14 gb?? gimme a break....

"640k ought to be enough for anybody". Right? A lot of people need large drives and the need is only increasing. To claim no one needs this much space is both short sighted and totally wrong. I have a 6 TB hard drive already filled with backups and raw video for my work. I could certainly use more.

 

[Kibaruk]

Are there some 14TB SSDs out there I don't know about? Traditional hard drives have vastly more capacity and are much more affordable. Storage space will always win out over speed for certain uses. Use an SSD for your boot drive and OS. I'm not going to back up 8TB of data on an SSD though, that would be stupid.

I'm here with you. The pricing is not even close to getting massive amounts of storage on SSD, even getting a single TB of SSD is too expensive yet to do the switch.

 

[MoeJoe]

Are there some 14TB SSDs out there I don't know about? Traditional hard drives have vastly more capacity and are much more affordable. Storage space will always win out over speed for certain uses. Use an SSD for your boot drive and OS. I'm not going to back up 8TB of data on an SSD though, that would be stupid.

who needs 14 gb?? gimme a break... that is "needed' by perhaps .1% of the computing population.

1 gb SSD and youre good to go, believe me. If you need more get an external portable drive.

Fixed it for you. Pretty sure you meant to type 1 TB.

 

[Uncle Al]

I can think of a few that will benefit from such a large drive, especially those that are seriously into Video and editing. As for everybody else .... well, backing that baby up will be 30 day affair!

 

[UmbraEmsisoft]

For 14gb I hope the SSD's lifetime is quite long.

 

[senketsu]

FWIW I use a Samsung 950 pro NVMe boot 512 GB
3 x 4 TB Western Digital Black plus a 2 TB WD Black which gives me....14 TB
likely be less expensive to buy two 6 TB WD Red's than this mofo for backup

 

[Draconian]

"has a claimed 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures)."

It can last 285 years? What?

 

[bob333]

"has a claimed 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures)."

It can last 285 years? What?

Your grand grand kids can still use it. Load it up with vintage stuff.

 

[flipp3r]

Great, my next 12bay NAS will use these drives! Don't care who owns the HGST branding, these enterprise drives have always been rock solid for me...

 

[UmbraEmsisoft]

Your grand grand kids can still use it. Load it up with vintage stuff.

 

[sac39507]

If only I had money laying around. What a mighty NAS unit I can have.

 

[Hollow]

Still with non SSD drives? what year is this? 2002?

Are there some 14TB SSDs out there I don't know about? Traditional hard drives have vastly more capacity and are much more affordable. Storage space will always win out over speed for certain uses. Use an SSD for your boot drive and OS. I'm not going to back up 8TB of data on an SSD though, that would be stupid.

World largest SSD is 60 TB. We don't do "backups" anymore, we store data on the cloud. Anyway, in less than a decade normal hard drives will go extinct.

 

[Kris95]

World largest SSD is 60 TB. We don't do "backups" anymore, we store data on the cloud. Anyway, in less than a decade normal hard drives will go extinct.

Sure and it only costs what, $40,000 or something like that? I'll stick with hard drives for my backups, and forget the cloud. It would take years to upload that much on my connection and I don't trust it anyway. I want my files here with me. Less than a decade left for normal hard drives? Not a chance. They are going to be with us for a long, long time.

 

[captaincranky]

If only I had money laying around. What a mighty NAS unit I could have.

< Fixed. That was a "conditional statement. "Can" was a bit too, shall we say, "optimistic".

In any case, here's a metaphor for that sentiment, "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride".

(Truly sorry about that.I don't know what gets into me sometimes. Well, in this case I do. I send the "angels of my better nature" home on Saturday night. They're in an "angels union", and this would be double time).

 

[captaincranky]

who needs 14 gb?? gimme a break... that is "needed' by perhaps .1% of the computing population.

1 gb SSD and youre good to go, believe me. If you need more get an external portable drive.

You would be absolutely correct about all of this, if everyone in the world was you, and used their computer exactly in the same way you use yours.

So, why don't you, "give us a break", and put your soapbox away.

 

[Per Hansson]

Just as a note this is not a drop in replacement due to the host managed SMR storage technology:

"Host-managed SMR Technology: Second-generation enterprise storage deployment of host-managed SMR delivers 14TB with no compromise of performance predictability and consistency. Host-managed SMR hard drives are designed specifically for sequential write environments, and will not work as drop-in replacements for traditional capacity enterprise drives."