World’s First 14TB HDD Is Here, But It’s Not For Mass Market Consumers

With modern technology increasing the demand for bigger hard drive space, the news that a 14TB hard disk drive exists might make some people happy. Unfortunately, it would seem that this new, super high capacity hard drive is only meant for data centers and large companies. It will not be made available to the mass consumer market.

The hard drive in question is the new Ultrastar Hs14, which is made by Western Digital, The Verge reports. It’s the first hard drive to have 14TB of memory storage, which makes it valuable to both data centers and consumers who regularly use up a lot of data. It will reportedly have transfer speeds of 223MiB/s and comes in both SATA and SAS formats.

According to the company, the new drive is more efficient due to its helium structure and has twice the performance when it comes to sequential writing compared to the previous version. It supposedly also has a Mean Time Between Failures of 2.5 million hours, which should make it highly reliable if it performs as indicated on paper.

Unfortunately for those who are hoping that the hard drive will come to the mass market, this is simply not going to be the case. Seagate is working on its own high capacity hard drive that is meant to offer 14TB and 16TB of storage, but it will still take about 18 months before those drives hit the market, TechSpot reports. In the meantime, Western Digital senior vice president, Mark Grace touts the benefits of its new hard drive, particularly with regards to the helium gas in the drives.

“"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)," Grace said. "The TCO and reliability benefits of our HelioSeal platform are the foundation of our leadership in high-capacity enterprise storage."