Western Digital today announced the world’s first 14TB hard drive featuring host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology targeting cloud and hyperscale data centers.
Western Digital’s HGST-branded Ultrastar Hs14 delivers 40 percent more capacity and more than twice the sequential write performance of its SMR predecessor.
Ultrastar Hs14 drives deliver better capacity and online watt/TB power efficiency for low TCO by harnessing two core complementary technologies – fourth generation HelioSeal technology, and second generation host-managed SMR – along with enterprise-class reliability.
By utilizing SMR technology, Ultrastar Hs14 HDDs offer 16 percent increase in capacity.
“Over 70 percent 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.
The company is shipping the Ultrastar Hs14 enterprise hard drive to select OEMs. The world’s first 14TB hard drive comes with a 5-year limited warranty.
Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Devices, Western Digital, said, “Our enterprise and hyperscale cloud customers demand reliability with the highest capacities and densities to deliver the lowest TCO for business-critical applications.”
The company said Ultrastar DC HC530, a follow-on to the industry’s first 14TB SMR drive, is a 14TB CMR drive that delivers drop-in simplicity for random write workloads in enterprise and cloud data centers.
Tencent, a global Internet service provider based in China, is adopting Western Digital’s HelioSeal-based hard drives for their Tencent Cloud data centers. Tencent Cloud has already deployed 12TB HelioSeal HDDs.
“Western Digital’s helium-filled HDDs provide the low-power and high-capacity we need to meet these demands in a cost-efficient and reliable manner. We will work with Western Digital to qualify the new 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530 drives,” Huang Bing Qi, director of Tencent Cloud, said.
