Western Digital Introduces 12TB HDD for Business Market

Western Digital has introduced a 12TB version of the HGST He12 Helium HDD. It is the first model of this size. The company also indicates that it is working on a 14TB variant and has introduced some SSDs for the business market.

Western Digital markets the drives under the HGST brand name. The Ultrastar He12 is equipped with eight platters and can be supplied with a 12Gb/s-sas or sata600 interface. To achieve the high data density, the hard drive is filled with helium, which has a much lower density than air, allowing for thinner drives. HGST gives the drive an MTBF rating of 2.5 million hours and a five-year warranty. The company has indicated that it will soon release a 14TB variant of the drive, which is the same hardware in terms of hardware, but uses SMR technology, with the magnetic paths slightly overlapping each other.

The two SSDs that the company has introduced are the Ultrastar SN200 and SS200. The SN200 is an NVME SSD that comes in 2.5″ and PCI-e versions with capacities between 800GB and 8TB. ​​WD promises random-read performance up to 1,200,000 iops and write performance up to 200,000 iops.

The SS200 comes in variants from 400GB to 8TB. WD claims that the drive can achieve read speeds of 1800MB/s and write speeds of 1000MB/s. It is striking that HGST uses a 2.5″ format with this SSD and a SAS interface that can handle a maximum of 12Gbit/s. This limits the maximum theoretical throughput speed to 1500MB/s, less than the 1800MB/s that WD promises. read performance of the ssd is 250,000 iops and write performance is up to 86,000 iops.

WD indicates that the hard drive and SSDs are currently being tested on some users. The SSDs will be available in the first quarter of 2017 and the 12TB HDD sometime in the first half of 2017. The 14TB model should be on sale in mid-2017. WD has not disclosed any prices.