Hard Drive of the Year: HGST UltraStar He12 12TB

NVMe SSD drives are taking all the headlines recently—and rightly so: they’re really fast! But you still need raw storage for all your games, especially now that games are reaching 100GB or more in size. This is why you need 12 terabytes of capacity. 

Western Digital and its subsidiary HGST were the first to announce hard drives with 12TB of capacity, filled with helium and available with SATA interfaces. This means that for the first time, desktop users can buy drives in capacities that would normally be available only to businesses first.

Why’s the UltraStar He12 great? HGST packs its He-series with enterprise-grade components. This means better quality spindles, vibration detection, and other components that make 24-hour operation possible. It’s also backed by a nice five-year warranty to ease your worries.

Performance wise, the He12 spins at 7200RPM and packs either a 6gbps SATA or 12gbps SAS interface, and is capable of dishing out roughly 250MBps. Although this doesn’t hold a candle to even mediocre SSDs, it’s still plenty fast for storing large chunks of data, especially games. You normally only load things into memory once anyway.

If you want the beefiest hard drive on the market, the Western Digital/HGST UltraStar He12 is the best.