Toshiba Announces Helium Filled 14TB HDD with 9 Platters

Toshiba has announced the MG07ACA series of HDDs. These consist of models with 12TB and eight platters and 14TB drives with nine platters. In both cases, these are 3.5″ HDDs with a thickness of 26.1 mm, which are filled with helium.

In the model with 14TB capacity, the pmr platters have a storage density of about 1.56TB, with the 12TB models that is a more regular 1.5TB. The manufacturer uses eighteen heads for the nine-platter version and sixteen for the 8-platter HDD. Toshiba focuses with the drives on use for cloud services and enterprise storage.

The MG07ACA discs succeed the MG06ACA models. The maximum storage capacity of that series is 10TB. The new discs are filled with helium and Toshiba uses laser welding to ensure the enclosures are completely sealed.

The hard drives have a rotation speed of 7200rpm and are equipped with a SATA600 interface. Furthermore, they both have 256MB cache. Toshiba will immediately start sending samples to its customers. They should become widely available at a later date for an unknown price.

It’s not the first 14TB HDDs: WD already announced 14TB business drives in October. Western Digital and Seagate have been offering helium-filled HDDs for several years now. Helium has a lower density than air, which means less friction, allowing manufacturers to put more platters in the discs.