Today Western Digital (WDC) announced that is has begun accelerate the development its nine-disk mechanical platform and leveraged energy-assisted recording technology in or to deliver the highest capacity HDDs yet. The company stat that it will have a 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD and a 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD sampling to select customers by the end of the year with larger production aimed at the first half of 2020. These new massive capacity HDD’s will be aimed at OEM and hyperscale data center customers.
Today Western Digital (WDC) announced that is has begun accelerate the development its nine-disk mechanical platform and leveraged energy-assisted recording technology in or to deliver the highest capacity HDDs yet. The company stat that it will have a 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD and a 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD sampling to select customers by the end of the year with larger production aimed at the first half of 2020. These new massive capacity HDD’s will be aimed at OEM and hyperscale data center customers.
As data continues to grow so does the need for dense storage. While flash storage has made major strides in a capacity to density ratio, most of the data created and stored just doesn’t need the performance provided by flash nor the cost associated with it. A technology that helps get more data in the same space is SMR. Western Digital plans on meeting these needs with the best TCO with its new SMR and CMR HDDs.
With the new drives, Western Digital will have a portfolio of capacity enterprise HDDs for every capacity point, including:
- six-disk 10TB Ultrastar DC HC330 air-based HDD
- eight-disk 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530 helium-based HDD
- nine-disk 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 helium-based HDD
- nine-disk 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 helium-based HDD
Availability
Western Digital will sample the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD and the Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD in 18TB and 16TB capacities to select customers by the end of this year, with qualification and volume shipments beginning in the first half of 2020.
Western Digital Data Center HDDs
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