Western Digital is providing cloud and hyperscale data centers the capacity required by big data applications with the first 14TB enterprise-class hard drive featuring host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology and HelioSeal technology.

Western Digital's HGST-branded Ultrastar Hs14 delivers 40 percent more capacity and more than twice the sequential write performance of its SMR predecessor, enabling more economical and efficient capture of the growing volume and variety of data.

The new hard disk is featuring fourth generation HelioSeal technology, and second generation host-managed SMR.

With a density 1/7th that of air, helium provides a low turbulence environment for the recording head to fly over the disk at nanometer scale.

SMR uses an "overlapping" writing technique, to pack more bits into the same space. This way of storing data is a great match for hyperscale data center software architectures that rely heavily on sequential writes to store vast amounts of data.

By utilizing SMR technology, Ultrastar Hs14 HDDs offer a 16 percent increase in capacity compared to 12TB drives using perpendicular
magnetic recording (PMR) technology, while keeping reliable performance. Because host-managed SMR enforces a sequential stream of all incoming data, and also provides control at the host
level, WD's customers can tier their storage from hot-to-cold while
maintaining a consistent performance profile regardless of packet size, number of data streams, or workload.

SMR can be implemented in multiple ways. Working with cloud customers, Western Digital has focused on the Host Managed (HM) implementation of SMR. To take advantage of the capacity and predictable performance of host-managed SMR, WD's customers will need to modify their end application or kernel space to interface with new command sets, and data streams must be sequentialized for writing to the drive.

The company has also been involved with Industry Standards bodies, as well as the open source community, to make sure that APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), code samples, and technical information is readily available.

In terms's of reliability, the Ultrastar Hs14 has amongst the industry's highest MTBF rating at 2.5M hours.

The 3.5-inch, 7,200 RPM hard drive is currently sampling to select OEMs and comes with a 5-year limited warranty.