Although Western Digital is meanwhile also active in the SSD market, they’re going to launch two new high-capacity HDDs. Both models belong to the HGST Ultrastar series providing 12TB and 14TB of storage space. To provide an increased life-span, these drives are going to be pre-filled with helium.

The 12TB HGST Ultrastar HE12 is already available. It has been equipped with eight platter and spins at 7200 RPM. There already are versions with either SAS or SATA interface, which makes those drives interesting for enterprise customers as well as end users. The 14TB HGST Ultrastar HE12 will be available at a later stage, by the end of the year.

Both models feature 256MB of cache with 8ms seek time for reads and writes. The main difference between these models, beside the capacity, is the data recording method. While the 12TB uses perpendicular magnetic recording, the 14TB features shingled magnetic recording. With the second method it’s possible to store up to 25% more data per platter compared to PMR. In other words this could mean, that it won’t take very long until we see the first 16TB drives appear.





Source: KitGuru