Seagate Announces Exos X14 14TB Helium PMR HDD

Ron Perillo / 6 years ago

Seagate’s First 14TB PMR Drive for Enterprise

Seagate is introducing their first 14 TB capacity which does not use shingled magnetic recording like WDC’s HGST HS14 2nd gen. Instead, this drive called the Exos X14 is filled with helium and uses perpendicular magnetic (PMR) platters. It still operates at 7200 RPM, but since it is a helium drive, it uses lower power than typical drives. Since it is for enterprise use, the Exos X14 also features Seagate’s secure hardware encryption technology. Plus, it is FIPS 140-2/Level 2 and ISO/EIC 15408 certified for secure storage use.

How Much is the Seagate Exos 14 14TB Drive?

The drive is not available yet outside of select Seagate Enterprise customers. According to Anandtech, Seagate does intend to start volume shipment on summer 2018. However, no further details about release date or pricing is available yet.

In this space, Toshiba has their own MG07ACA 14TB which will start shipping in Q2 2018. Toshiba’s 14TB drive are helium-sealed as well and is a 9-disk model. Seagate did not disclose transfer rates yet, but Toshiba’s similar non-shingled drive boasts 298MB.sec with a 268MB cache via SATA. The company will be releasing a 6Gbit/s SATA and a 12Gbit/s SAS version as well. Otherwise, the company is keeping much of the drive’s details under wraps. It is not even clear whether it uses an 8 (1.75TB) or 9 (1.56TB) platter design.

The Exos X14 hard drive will be on display in booth #A14 at the OCP U.S. Summit 2018 alongside several other products that meet Open Compute Project specifications. Additional product demonstrations will showcase the Guardian Series portfolio, Nytro Q-Boost, HAMR-based drives as well as the Nytro 5000 NVMe SSD.

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