Western Digital Launches the First Ever 12 TB & 14 TB Hard Disks

Hard drives are about big enough for some people at 2-3 TB capacities. Some are OK with 1 TB too. Now who would want a 12 TB or 14 TB hard drive? Surely there must be some storage enthusiasts out there that hoard large amounts of data.

Western Digital (WD) is going to ship 12 TB consumer hard drives starting this month. That’s not all, the company is also going to release a 14 TB hard drive later this year.

Helium Filled Hard Drives

What makes these hard drives unique is that they’re filled with helium. Helium gas reduces drag and turbulence within the hard drive and reduces friction. This allows storage manufacturers to add more platters within a single hard drive and increase overall storage capacity.

According to WD (whose subsidiary HGST released the first helium drive), the storage density results in a lower cost per gigabyte and also a lower total cost of ownership.

Specifications

Both of the hard drives feature 8 platters. They both run at 7200 RPM as well which has almost become the standard these days. These will be available in SAS and SATA configurations for both, enterprise and regular consumers.

They will also feature 256MB of cache with an 8 ms seek time for reads and an 8.6 ms seek time for writes.

Here is where the similarities end.

The 14 TB HDD will be based on Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) rather than the faster and more reliable Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) which most hard drives use these days.

Even Bigger Ones Coming in The Future

SMR can record upto 25% more data per platter than a PMR drive so you can expect to see even larger capacity hard drives in the future.

WD did not share any pricing details but you can easily expect these two to cost above Rs. 20,000 when they are available in Pakistan.

Via Kit Guru

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