WD today announced a 12TB HDD and has stated to be working on a 14TB drive as well. Together with the new HDDs, the storage giant also announced several enterprise SSDs.
The Ultrastar He12 12TB HDD is sold under the HGST brand and contains 8 platters of 1.5TB each. The high capacity is possible due to the usage of Helium. This gas has a lower density than air which has the benefit that platters and heads suffer from less friction. This in its turn reduces generation of heat which allows platters to be closer to each other. Because in Helium it takes less energy to rotate the platters, the Helium filled HDDs also consume less energy. To properly function the HDDs have to be air-tight.
The drives will be available with either a 12Gb/s SAS or 6Gb/s SATA interface, have a MTBF rating at 2.5M hours and come with a 5-year limited warranty.
WD also announced that it will soon make 14TB variant of the drive available. This drive uses similar components but uses SMR technology which makes that magnetic tracks overlap similar to roof shingles.
The enterprise SSDs that the company introduced are also HGST branded.
The Ultrastar SN200 is a NVMe SSD that will be available in a 2.5" and PCIe version with capacities of 800GB to 8TB. WD specifies random reads of up to 830,000 IOPS and random write of up to 200,000 IOPS.
The Ultrastar SS200 SSDs comes in capacities ranging from 400GB to 8TB with specified random reads of up to 250,000 and random writes of up to 86,000 IOPS. The drive comes in a 2.5" form factor and connects to the computer using a SAS interface.
Both SSDs will become available in the first quarter of 2017 and the 12 TB HDD in the first half of 2017. The 14 TB model should become available somewhere in 2017. WD has not announced any pricing details.
