HGST – Now part of Western Digital – has launched a new 3.5″ (boo), 14 Terabyte (yay!) mechanical hard drive. Using Shingled Magnetic Recording, HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, I’m glad they acronym’d it!) has managed to cram 14 Terabytes into a single HDD, albeit for the enterprise. HGST has filled the drive with helium gas, a well known trick these days for increasing efficiencies.
The drive features a 512 MB cache, spins at 7200 RPM, has an average latency of 4.16 ms, and can throughput 223 megabits when really pushed.
While the drive is an enterprise-only unit, it does add another top tier to the HDD capacity stack, which hopefully means that lower-tier drives get cheaper sooner rather than later. However, there is no mention of price on this particular unit – but the likely buyers for such a drive will be buying them by the thousands, rather than by the single units!
Need 14TB? Store your thoughts here.
