Western Digital is raising the enterprise hard drive stakes once again with the announcement of a 14 TB 3.5” hard drive. The HGST branded Ultrastar Hs14 uses fourth generation HelioSeal and second generation host-managed SMR (shingled magnetic recording) to enable a 14 TB drive that is just as fast as its smaller capacity enterprise predecessors despite the impressive 1034 Gb/sq in areal density. Western Digital claims the new hard drive offers up 40% more capacity and twice the sequential write performance of its previous SMR drives.
The 3.5” SMR hard drive comes in SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12 Gbps flavors with both equipped with 512 MB cache, operating at 7200 RPM, and supporting maximum sustained transfer speeds of 233 MB/s. The enterprise drive is geared towards sequential writes and is intended to be the storage target for big data applications like Facebook, video streaming services, and research and financial workloads that generate absolutely massive amounts of raw data that needs to sit in archival storage but remain easily accessible (where tape is not as desirable). According to the data sheet (PDF), it is also aimed at bulk cloud storage and online backup as well as businesses storing compliance, audit, and regulatory records.
For those curious about Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), Allyn shared some thoughts on the technology here.
Western Digital rates the drive at 550 TB/year and supports the Hs14 with a five year warranty. The drive is currently being sampled to a small number of OEMs with wider availability to follow.
Also read:
Spinning rust needs to die
Spinning rust needs to die for all but cold storage or something like amazon glacier. I mean as allyn said, the rebuild time on a drive like this is going to be crazy.
Rebuild time? As in RAID? As
Rebuild time? As in RAID? As in 2005?
I gave up RAID several years ago and it was the best decision I ever made. Software drive pooling, data management, duplication, cloud backup, etc. there are so many better alternatives that eliminate the need for RAID for a lot of users and enterprise situations.
This is good. now you can
This is good. now you can build that mitx system with a m.2 nvme drive and one of these and have all the space you will need at least for now. for consumption of 4k/8k+ we will all need the extra capacity unless cheap async 1gb/s connections to the home drops from the heavens. in the long run physical media like ssd/flash/blu-ray is likely going to be around for a long while
So far, most of the 4K
So far, most of the 4K blu-rays on my server are ~50-70GB in size, so roughly double the size of the 1080p blu-rays, despite having 4x pixels at 64x the color depth. By the time we get 8K media, we’ll probably have an even better compression method than HEVC. Point is, better compression techniques greatly reduce the need for more storage.
To a point though. BluRay can
To a point though. BluRay can only add so many layers to increase capacity before someone has to come up with a new method of storing data on a disk. I think someone was coming up with holographic storage which was a thicker platter and used lasers to let them write on multiple layers in a significant amount higher than possible with BluRay. Not sure whatever came of that but something like that would be needed as BluRay I think is currently maxed out at 100GB with 4 layers.
Excellent post.
Excellent post.