Western Digital Takes HDD Storage Crown With Capacious 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620

The Ultrastar DC HC620 is available in capacities of up to 15TB, which is just 1TB greater than the previous high watermark for currently shipping HDDs. The Ultrastar DC HC620 makes use of a 3.5-inch form-factor (SAS and SATA interface are available) and leverages second-generation shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. In addition, Western Digital says that the storage family employs fourth-generation HelioSeal technology to help deliver efficient and reliable service to customers.

Further tooting its own horn Western Digital, says that the Ultrastar DC HC620 provides the highest capacity HDDs with the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). The Ultrastar DC HC620 family -- which is available in both 14TB and 15TB SKUs -- has a 2.5 million-hour MTBF and comes backed with a 5-year limited warranty.

"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," said Eyal Bek, Western Digital VP of Product Marketing. "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."

Western Digital says that customers will be able to load out a 4U60 HDD enclosure with enough 15TB drives to have a total of 900TB on command. Such large caches of storage will be beneficial for a variety of workloads including video surveillance, regulatory compliance, hyperscale cloud and Big Data storage.

The Ultrastar DC HC620 is currently sampling to select Western Digital customers, and will reach broad availability before the close of 2018.