Western Digital Launches 14TB HGST Ultrastar Hs14

Western Digital announced that it is releasing the world’s largest hard drive disk. Indeed, the monstrous HGST Ultrastar Hs14 – designed for industrial applications – boasts a whopping 14TB capacity. In fact, the Helium-filled drive offers 40% more capacity and twice the sequential write speed than its SMR predecessor. In addition, the drive features an MTBF of 2.5 million hours and comes with a 5-year warranty.

HDD scaling is becoming increasingly difficult, and 14TB is definitely the higher end of the potential scale. Note, though, that the HGST Ultrastar Hs14 is an industrial drive. At present, the biggest consumer HDD is Seagate’s 10TB Barracuda Pro. However, with a 16TB Seagate HDD en route, the HGST Ultrastar Hs14 won’t be a record-breaker for long.

Western Digital HGST Ultrastar Hs14 Specifications

• Interface:
  • SATA:
    • 6Gb/s
  • SAS:
    • 12Gb/s
• Capacity (GB): 14
• Sector Size (Variable, Bytes/sector):
  • SATA:
    • 512e: 512
    • 4Kn: 4096
  • SAS
    • 512e: 512, 520, 528
    • 4Kn: 4096, 4112, 4160, 4224
• Max Areal Density (Gbits/sq. in.): 1034 (max)
• Form Factor: 3.5-inch
• Data Buffer (MB): 512
• Rotational Speed (RPM): 7200
• Latency Average (ms): 4.16
• Interface Transfer Rate (MB/sec, max):
  • SATA:
    • 600
  • SAS:
    • 1200
• Sustained Transfer Rate: 223 MiB/s (max)
• Seek Time (read, ms, typical):  7.7/12.0

Western Digital Says

Mark Grace, Senior VP of Devices at Western Digital, says:

“Over 70% 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).

The TCO and reliability benefits of our HelioSeal platform is the foundation of our leadership in high capacity enterprise storage.”

Price and Availability

HGST Ultrastar Hs14 release date and pricing is to be confirmed.