Western Digital unveils a family of 14 and 15TB HDDs-- the HGST Ultrastar DC HC620, drives aimed at read-focused enterprise applications featuring shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology.
"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," WD says. "Enabling the world’s densest server and storage systems, incorporating 15TB HDDs allows a fully populated 4U60 HDD enclosure to reach a raw storage capacity of 900TB, which is an additional 60TB per 4U rack in the same footprint compared to those utilizing 14TB 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,"
The HC620 HDDs are based on the 4th generation HelioSeal helium-filled enterprise platform, packing x8 SMR platters with multiple internal enhancements designed to improve the reliability and durability of HDDs working in vibrating multi-drive environments. Each platter packs 1.75 or 1.875TB capacity, with a 1034 and 1108 Gbit areal density per square inch. The 14TB version offers up to 233MB/s sequential read/write, while the 15TB reaches 255MB/s sequential read/write, a record for SMR HDDs.
The drives also feature 7200 RPM spindle speed, 512MB DRAM buffer for indirect table management, 7.7ms read seek time, 1.2ms typical seek time and 4.16ms typical latency. The interface of choice is either SATA 6Gbps or SAS 12Gbps, with power consumption reaching up to 6.4W in the SATA version or up to 8.3W in the SAS interface.
SMR technology involves the recording of magnetic tracks by partly overlapping recorded tracks in a "shingle roof tile" manner. Such a method is ideal for sequential writes, but less so in the case of re-writes. As such, SMR HDDs are best for write once read many (WORM) applications, such as content delivery services, as opposed to typical server workloads.
The HC620 series drives are available now, if for a seclect customer base.