WW Record Beaten by Western Digital on HDD: 15TB

Western Digital Corp. announced the highest capacity HDD, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 host-managed SMR HDD.

It delivers an unprecedented capacity point with a time-to-market advantage for customers who have invested in, and continue to take advantage of the benefits of SMR.

“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, VP 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 positioned for hyperscale cloud and traditional data center workloads, including large video surveillance ”smart city’ initiatives, storage for regulatory compliance and big storage.

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, terabyte 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 14TB SMR HDD, the 15TB enterprise Ultrastar DC HC620 host-managed SMR HDD reflects another industry first, continuing the company’s tradition of delivering the highest capacity enterprise HDDs in the market.

Western Digital is currently shipping Ultrastar DC HC620 qualification samples to select customers with broader availability later this quarter.

Comments

From former 14TB to new 15TB HDDs, the increased is only 7% in capacity and is not going to upset the industry.

Since the introduction of the first HDD, IBM RAMAC, at 3.75MB, in 1956, capacity increased at a 19% CAGR up to now and few years ago it was doubling about each year.

But in this sector, each time a vendor reach a record, the device will find customers.

These high-end part of the market is now the only one really growing as low-end 2.5-inch HDDs are seriously attacked by SSDs a well as fastest enterprise units at 10,000 and 10,000rpm but WD stated that "Ultrastar DC HC620 drives are designed specifically for sequential-write environments and will not work as drop-in replacements for traditional capacity enterprise drives."

The most recent device combines host-managed SMR with HelioSeal technology.

At 7,200rpm with 6Gb SATA or 12Gb SAS interfaces, there are 8 disks inside, according to Trendfocus commenting "SMR HDDs in the nearline space have been a niche item for a number of years as customers and the HDD industry have worked together to optimize the potential performance degradation that SMR can levy when large blocks of previously shingled tracks are modified. Early SMR HDDs utilized drive-managed schemes which continue to work in client applications but have been rejected in the enterprise due to poor performance under heavy write workloads. Over the past couple of years, small and large hyperscale customers have migrated to a host-managed SMR scheme with some companies investing the resources to re-architect host software and hardware to accept host-managed SMR HDDs. Traditional enterprise OEMs have largely avoided SMR, not only due to the effort to optimize host-side hardware, but also due to the fact that the thousands of customers for those OEM server and storage systems would have differing workloads that could result in unpredictable SMR HDD performance."

What will be next capacity points? Apparently two brand new technologies will be used, not anymore SMR. WD counts on MAMR to reach 16TB by 2019 and 40TB by 2025 and Seagate on HAMR to ship to key customers by end of 2018 and reaching 20TB HDD by 2020.

Specs
Cick to enlarge

Read also:
Toshiba Following Western Digital/HGST With 14TB 3.5-Inch HDD
9 disks, helium based, 6Gb SATA, 7,200rpm, CMR and not SMR
2017.12.11 | Press Release | [with our comments]
WW Historical Record Capacity for HDD: 14TB, by Western Digital/HGST
With host-managed SMR and helium
2017.10.04 | Press Release | [with our comments]
MAMR by Western Digital: New Technology to Increase Capacity of HDD
To reach 16TB by 2019 and 40TB by 2025
2017.10.17 | Press Release | [with our comments]