Western Digital launches a 14TB HGST helium-filled hard drive

New drive aimed at hyperscale data centres and cloud providers

Storage vendor Western Digital has announced a helium-filled hard drive with a capacity of 14TB.

The HGST Ultrastar Hs14 is a 4th-generation Helioseal 3.5in 7200RPM drive aimed at the enterprise and also at cloud providers and hyperscale data centres, offering more capacity with less space.

The Ultrastar Hs14 isn't just about the capacity, although it is 40 per cent more capacious than its predecessor in the range. Performance is also improved, says WD, with double the sequential write speed of the last drive in the series, making for a huge potential rise in throughput and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

"Over 70 per cent 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 is the foundation of our leadership in high capacity enterprise storage."

With an MTBF of 2.5m hours, the drive is designed to last, with a 5-year limited warranty and host-managed Shingle Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology.

The limitation of SMR is that it doesn't stand up to constant rewrites, so this is very much a drive designed for write-once, read-occasionally cold storage use cases, such as archived photos from social networks and machine-to-machine records.

The drive is currently sampling with selected OEMs and will be available publicly at a later date, possibly by the end of the year. As with most drives aimed at the high-end commercial market, there's no specific pricing for this drive. The HGST Hs range is already available in 10TB and 12TB capacities.

Earlier this month, WD launched its WD Gold range, also aimed at the data centre, as the Western Digital continues to cross-pollinate technologies from its four brands.

The firm also recently aquired Tegile Systems, a vendor of hybrid and all-flash storage arrays.