WD MegaScale DC Hard Drives

HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced that it is shipping its new MegaScale DC 4000.B, a 3.5-inch, 4 TB, 6 Gb/s SATA hard disk drive (HDD). As the company's second-generation MegaScale drive, the new MegaScale DC 4000.B has been further optimized based on customer feedback to meet the explosive growth of infrequently accessed data, while balancing the right mix of power, capacity, performance and reliability. 

As part of a tiered storage strategy, the MegaScale DC 4000.B is designed for low-workload applications such as bulk storage for unstructured or big data, disk-to-disk backup, online archives, or long-term data retention where cost-per-GB, watt-per-GB and GB-per-square foot are critical parameters.

"With the explosive adoption of free email, social networks and Internet services, the capacity requirements for cloud and hyperscale data centers are growing astronomically. These environments are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and the bottom line," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. "As a leading drive supplier to some of the world's largest cloud data center providers, we understand the demanding storage requirements for low workload applications in these hyperscale environments. With the MegaScale DC 4000.B, we're delivering massive capacity in a low-power, performance-optimized drive to help customers achieve superior capital savings, operational efficiencies and energy conservation in the data center."

The Right Drive for the Right Workload
Not all hard drives are created equal. When selecting a SAS or SATA "enterprise capacity" HDD, it's important to consider the application and the drive's intended workload. Depending on the workload, each application requires specific HDDs to meet certain performance, capacity, availability, footprint and economic parameters. To ensure optimal efficiency, it's critical that data center managers make informed decisions when selecting the right storage design with the right specifications for the right application workload. 

The MegaScale DC 4000.B HDD with CoolSpin performance is ideal for 24/7 low-workload environments that operate within 180 TB per year. These environments are characterized by being low-cost, high density and having moderate performance, and must be able to scale efficiently and deploy vast amounts of storage with the best TCO to help manage capacity, power, cooling and storage density.

In comparison, the HGST's premium Ultrastar 7K4000 drives feature 7,200 RPM performance and the industry's highest MTBF specification at 2 million hours. Used in cloud and corporate data centers around the world, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family sets the benchmark for 7,200 RPM high-performance, high-quality and high-reliability in workloads that operate within 550 TB/year. The drives are specifically designed for 24x7 capacity-optimized enterprise applications such as RAID, storage arrays, cloud storage, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations where performance, reliability and storage density are critical. 

"IT managers know that rapidly growing data in their data centers have a range of data access time and transfer speed requirements," said John Rydning, research vice president, IDC. "HDD manufacturers are providing a variety of high capacity HDDs designed for various application workloads, including HGST's new MegaScale 4 TB drive, to help IT managers realize total cost of ownership objectives over the life of the system."

Below is a chart that shows different characteristics and features by HGST Ultrastar and MegaScale drive families:

New MegaScale DC 4000.B Hard Drive
Targeting 24/7 low workloads that operate within 180 TB per year, the MegaScale DC 4000.B is rated at 800K MTBF, and offers specifications of 1 in 1014 non-recoverable bit error rate and 300K load/unload cycles. The MegaScale DC 4000.B features a Dual Stage Actuator (DSA) and Enhanced Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology for full performance, better stability and more reliability in rack-mount drive bays and servers. The 4TB MegaScale DC 4000.B offers 33 percent more capacity than 3 TB HDDs and supports 512e Advanced Format for custom data center environments.

The 4 TB MegaScale DC 4000.B also features HGST's innovative CoolSpin technology that delivers "optimized" performance with low power for data centers looking to reduce their environmental impact and improve energy efficiency in terms of power usage, cooling and storage density footprint. Utilizing HGST's CoolSpin technology, the drive uses up to 45 percent less operating power and 29 percent reduced idle power when compared to current 4 TB 7,200 RPM drives, which can mean significant cost savings for data center customers. The MegaScale DC 4000.B also offers five levels of Advanced Power Management around power consumption including: normal idle, unload idle, low RPM idle, standby, and sleep. The standby and sleep modes consume less than one watt per drive to help ensure that archival applications remain online and response-ready, at the most eco-friendly power levels.

MegaScale DC 4000.B hard drive also comes with optional bulk data encryption (BDE) with enhanced secure erase technology for added data security, and easy and safe hard drive redeployment.

The 4 TB MegaScale DC 4000.B is currently shipping and comes with a three-year limited warranty.