World’s biggest hard disk drive goes on sale

This is an automatic summary, original reduced by 38%.

This is a fourth-generation 3.5-inch helium hard drive which is built using PMR technology and made for supreme reliability, which isn't surprising seeing as it's aimed at the enterprise arena - but it gives us a good flavour of what's coming to the consumer world, too.

SAS or SATA. It's also worth noting that the Ultrastar He12 is available with either a SATA or SAS interface, and is a self-encrypting drive that also benefits from an 'instant secure erase' feature for fully wiping out data before redeploying the disk.

As for the core specs, the He12 is a 7200rpm hard drive with an average latency of 4.16ms and it's capable of a sustained transfer rate of 255MB/s.

We can expect to see larger helium drives before long, with HGST planning a 14TB SMR flavour of its helium drive which should be out mid-year, and Seagate preparing a 16TB model for 2018.

As we hit the end of the decade, we can expect helium drives to reach 20TB capacity.

Western Digital has previously said that it expects helium drives to become mainstream, meaning the average user will be able to get their hands on large capacity disks offering plenty of bang for buck.

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