News Western Digital teases 14TB UltraStar hard drive

That's impressive. My largest drive is 1TB...

 

I want/need a few, but after being burnt by SMR, I'll wait until a) we know actual performance numbers in situ, b) price and c) reliability.

C is my biggest concern; backing up 14TB of data is no joke. Losing it is a worse one.

I've fallen back to Enterprise-grade 4TB drives, as they seem to be the most reliable currently. I've been burnt by too many 6TB-and-up drives (the best joke ever was buying WD drives labelled 6TB (5.45TB formatted) that were actually 5TB (4.54TB) with the wrong sticker on... was not impressed.

 

14TB, that's def more than a brain

 

What's the pricing like on these compared with similarly sized SSDs? Obviously it will be a fair bit lower, but just curious to see how the gap is steadily closing. With drives getting this big, having simply that much more speed must begin to be quite handy for backups and whatnot.

 

Since the HDD in question is aimed at data centre use we should look at SSDs aimed at a similar scenario:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/16t...lc-set-nand-500mb-s-read-430mb-s-write-65k-15

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/38t...-mlc-v-nand-520mb-s-read-480mb-s-write-97k-24

And that is the ultra low end of it... when it comes to enterprise ssd pricing the sky is the limit.

 

That's the thing though, those are much smaller, more commercial drives. I mean the whopping 12-16TB ones that are also shipping out. I would think that whilst pricing is still much higher than the above HDD, it can't be that long until the price is low enough that the speed increases (along with smaller footprint and power usage etc.) start to make sense. I mean if you're backing up 1PB of data, that could make a sizeable difference for example.

 

4 of the 4TB Samsung ones would still be cheaper than a single big one as unfortunately the big ones are still ludicrously expensive (but still fly off the shelves due to companies being desperate for them).

$10k for 15.3TB
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10533...33a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k

 

I don't think SSD will ever catch up to platters in price vs capacity, but there might come a time that platters simply stop being made and then the question becomes moot of course.