Western Digital Offers Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD with 15TB storage volume

Hard disks (HDD) with up to 14 TB of storage space you can buy. The next step was expected to be 16 TB, but Western Digital just announced theor Ultrastar DC HC620 series which is a 15 TB hard drive. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) provides the necessary data density.

Shingled Magnetic Recording is a comparatively inexpensive method for increasing the storage density. However, the disadvantage of the technique is that when rewriting, adjacent tracks also have to be updated, which means some loss of performance. For this reason, SMR hard drives are primarily used for rare and sequential write applications such as archival storage and cloud storage.

"With data continuing to grow at unprecedented rates, many hyperscale and cloud storage customers know that their workloads trend toward data that is written sequentially. In these instances, customers are optimizing their infrastructures with the lowest TCO and the maximum capacity," said Eyal Bek, vice president of product marketing, Western Digital. "By capitalizing on our highest-capacity SMR storage solutions, our customers' investment can not only be fully leveraged today, but for subsequent generations of SMR areal density improvements for continued infrastructure optimization."

Setting a new bar for TCO, the Ultrastar 15TB host-managed SMR HDD is well positioned for hyperscale cloud and traditional data center workloads, including large video surveillance "smart city" initiatives, storage for regulatory compliance and Big Data storage. Enabling the world's densest server and storage systems, incorporating 15 TB HDDs allows a fully populated 4U60 HDD enclosure to reach a raw storage capacity of 900 TB, which is an additional 60 TB per 4U rack in the same footprint compared to those utilizing 14 TB HDDs. In an at-scale environment where floor space, $/TB, TB per square foot, or watts per terabyte are critical, this TCO savings can be significant.

Based on the company's proven HelioSeal platform, and as an extension to the industry's first 14 TB SMR HDD family, the 15TB enterprise-class Ultrastar DC HC620 host-managed SMR HDD reflects another industry first, continuing the company's tradition of delivering the highest capacity enterprise-class HDDs in the market. Western Digital is currently shipping Ultrastar DC HC620 qualification samples to select customers with broader availability later this quarter.

The new Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD further expands Western Digital's broad range of enterprise-class storage solutions, which include high-performance NVMe SSD devices, innovative HelioSeal enterprise-class hard disk drives as well as SAS and SATA SSDs. The company's data center systems include its ActiveScale , IntelliFlash , OpenFlex , and Ultrastar storage servers and platforms.