Western Digital launch a 14TB drive

[ItsMitch]

 

Western Digital has officially launched their own 14TB drives which is bloody bananas. It's as of posting this not for sale and it'll be sold by the HGST arm of Western Digital and it'll be primarily used by huge data servers.

 

Quote from The Inquirer. 

 

Quote

WESTERN DIGITAL has announced yet another hike in the capacity of its spindle drive range with a 14TB beast from B2B arm HGST.

The helium-filled (Helioseal 4th generation) 3.5in 7200RPM drive is aimed at the enterprise arena and will serve to offer cloud and hyperscale data centres even more capacity with less space.

 

"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. 

2

I for one am happy that this is finally out but I dread to think the actual cost of this thing, the 12TB drive is around £600 in the UK and is hard to purchase. 

 

Sources: https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3018506/western-digital-launches-a-whopping-14tb-hgst-helium-hard-drive  | http://www.techradar.com/news/this-is-the-worlds-biggest-hard-drive-and-it-can-store-14tb

 

Manufacture: http://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-hs14

Edited October 4, 2017 by SC2Mitch
Link added

[Bananasplit_00]

7 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

bloody bananas

hey im actiually fine wtf you on about?... /s

 

 

[paddy-stone]

... And here's me with my 4TB drives

[ItsMitch]

Just now, huilun02 said:

Not priced for average joe because average joe doesn't need to have 14TB in the space of 1 drive.

I mean, Linus maybe

[samcool55]

1 minute ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

hey im actiually fine wtf you on about?... /s

 

 

Well you are split so i dunno, doesn't sound too healthy...

 

Anyway, it's nice that we see capacity increasing but i'm wondering how they are going to solve transfer speeds. The issue with drives like these is if one dies in a raid config or whatever it takes like a day to rebuild... (over 25 hours from 0 to 100% full if it can write at a constant 150MB/s)

[mynameisjuan]

So much data to lose all at once

[Dylanc1500]

Now crank it to 15k rpm so transfer rates will be higher.

[Sauron]

We're rapidly reaching the edge of practicality. If anything happens or you are using these as backups, reading 14 TB off of a hard disk will take days and may straight up break the drive.

6 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

Now crank it to 15k rpm so transfer rates will be higher.

Still not really enough, and you'd be lowering its reliability.

12 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Anyway, it's nice that we see capacity increasing but i'm wondering how they are going to solve transfer speeds. The issue with drives like these is if one dies in a raid config or whatever it takes like a day to rebuild... (over 25 hours from 0 to 100% full if it can write at a constant 150MB/s)

The only real solution would be not using a hard disk, or at least spreading the load among multiple drives. Eventually they'll have to give up and just move to SSDs. Price isn't really a good selling point for these things anymore, given the size markup the price per GB for ssd storage is less than 10 times as much and when you factor in maintenance and practicality the difference is probably much lower in the long run. And if you really need massive storage on the cheap, you can buy tape storage, which is not faster but at least can be trusted to not break after a full read cycle.

[samcool55]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

The only real solution would be not using a hard disk, or at least spreading the load among multiple drives. Eventually they'll have to give up and just move to SSDs. Price isn't really a good selling point for these things anymore, given the size markup the price per GB for ssd storage is less than 10 times as much and when you factor in maintenance and practicality the difference is probably much lower in the long run. And if you really need massive storage on the cheap, you can buy tape storage, which is not faster but at least can be trusted to not break after a full read cycle.

Sadly SSD's got more expensive during the last few months instead of getting cheaper.

We are still far away from that

 

Imo they should stick with like 3-4TB drives and make them faster, no idea how but they should

[TVwazhere]

28 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

... And here's me with my 4TB drives

Me with 3tb and a 5tb (close enough)

[ravenshrike]

41 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Not Linus, but Linus Media Group

80% of the data on LMG servers is Linus's personal porn collection. 15% is everyone else's porn collection with the remaining 5% being their actual business files.

[Coaxialgamer]

IMO , this isn't interesting . This isn't HAMR or anything like it , being a technology to increase density . they're just adding more platters , being able to do so with helium . those tighter tolerances are what you get when technology matures.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Dylanc1500 said:

Now crank it to 15k rpm so transfer rates will be higher.

Also add 1GB power protected DRAM, 512GB of NAND cache, SAS 12GB dual port then send me 300 of them 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

IMO , this isn't interesting . This isn't HAMR or anything like it , being a technology to increase density . they're just adding more platters , being able to do so with helium . those tighter tolerances are what you get when technology matures.

If HAMR has any of the pitfalls of SMR then you don't actually want it, SMR HDDs are epic slow for writes.

[Coaxialgamer]

Just now, leadeater said:

If HAMR has any of the pitfalls of SMR then you don't actually want it, SMR HDDs are epic slow for writes.

SMR is only an extension current PMR technologies . HAMR is a completely new way of arranging cells on the platter and require different read/write mechanisms . But my point was that this doesn't actually push technology forward . SMR , despite it's drawbacks , was a novel approach .

[ChickenGod]

Holy balls, 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Coaxialgamer said:

SMR is only an extension current PMR technologies . HAMR is a completely new way of arranging cells on the platter and require different read/write mechanisms . But my point was that this doesn't actually push technology forward . SMR , despite it's drawbacks , was a novel approach .

SMR is still very different to PMR, SMR uses overlapping tracks and when you need to write you have to read the data off the effected tracks then re-write hence terrible. SMR didn't really add much capacity at all and brought a whole bunch of draw backs with it, understandably it's not very popular. If HAMR has to do anything similar with track re-writing it'll only be used for write once read many just like SMR is.

 

There isn't enough information out there that I have found to know if HAMR is like that or not, HDMR from the sound of it definitely isn't'

[Lurick]

6 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Not priced for average joe because average joe doesn't need to have 14TB in the space of 1 drive.

Don't try and tell me what I don't need!

I'm an independant human who don't need no overlord! *snap* *snap* *snap*

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Don't try and tell me what I don't need!

I'm an independant human who don't need no overlord! *snap* *snap* *snap*

[TetraSky]

I wish they'd just kill off hard drives already to concentrate/ramp up production of, on the arguably superior in nearly every way, SSDs.

I mean come on, if Seagate's 60TB SSD that they showed last year is anything to go by, hard drives are doomed to die.

[DexterSmythe]

6 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

So much data to lose all at once

Not if you do backups. 

[NumLock21]

*Prepares to backup 14TB of data*

*Error! Cannot copy data, need a additional 100MB of space. Reduce size and try again*

*Shit!*

 

 

 

[Jito463]

8 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Not priced for average joe because average joe doesn't need to have 14TB in the space of 1 drive.

Says you.  This would replace all four of my HDD's with a few extra TB to spare.  Gimme, gimme.  I'll take 2 in RAID 1, thanks.

7 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

Me with 3tb and a 5tb (close enough)

And me with my 5TB, 3TB, 2TB and 1TB (plus my 240GB SSD).  I believe it's high time I phase out that 1TB, now that I think of it.

[snortingfrogs]

And here I am wih my 2x8TB, 1x5TB, 3x4TB, 4x3TB and 4x2TB...

[raphidy]

Just bought 2x6tb...dayum...i want them...