Western Digital Corp.plans to unveil a 14 terabyte hard drive for data centres in the second quarter of this year, Vivek Tyagi, director of business development, Western Digital Corp., India, said. “It is expected to be out in the second half of this year which is post-July. The main purpose of this enterprise drive is to move up in capacity and also lessen power consumption,” Mr. Tyagi said.
“As cloud storage expands and more and more data needs to be stored, everybody wants it to be stored at a lesser cost and space. They are helium-filled drives. They do not use normal air inside the drive. As helium is one-sixth lighter than air, it allows [for] bigger capacity. These drives consume 30% lower power.”
Western Digital is using a technology based on ‘shingled magnetic recording’ for its 14 terabyte drive. “There was concern about how long the hard drives will continue when flash drives arrived 6-7 years ago. A breakthrough in the MAMR technology will allow companies like us to build higher capacity drives and further lower costs,” he said. Smartphones and connected devices are driving the need for more storage space for data. Sectors such as banking, finance, insurance, healthcare and e-commerce, which require data to be stored for analytics and understanding consumer behaviour are the major drivers for bigger storage devices and data centres.
“Data is growing at an extremely rapid pace. One reason is, of course, the smartphone. Two billion people are moving around the world with a smartphone with high definition. Everybody is creating content. Similarly, IoT is another area where a lot of things are getting connected to the Internet.”
