World’s biggest hard drive gets bigger, increased to 14TB capacity

The world’s biggest hard drive has gotten even bigger as Western Digital has once again pushed the envelope with its hard drive on its industrial device increased to 14TB capacity.


The HGST Ultrastar Hs14 (remember that HGST is now a Western Digital brand) is a helium-filled enterprise-class hard drive aimed at data center and cloud computing customers, and brings 40 percent additional storage capacity and more than double the sequential write performance compared to its predecessor.

In addition to being helium-filled, the Hs14 makes use of 2nd-generation host-managed SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to boost the capacity.

The drive also brings with it power savings. The Hs14 only consumes 5.2W at idle, with that increasing to 6.4W during normal operation, overall adding up to 60 percent lower idle wattage/TB compared to 8TB air-filled hard 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),” said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. “The TCO and reliability benefits of our HelioSeal platform are the foundation of our leadership in high-capacity enterprise storage.”

Don’t expect this drive to be the biggest for too long, as Seagate is expected to release drives that hit 16TB next year.