Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC690 with 32 TB - Plenty of space for your movie archive

[14:20 Mon,21.October 2024 by Thomas Richter]

Western Digital is now shipping the Ultrastar DC HC690 Data Center Hard Drive, the world&s first 32TB UltraSMR hard drive. This storage capacity sets a new record for hard drives using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. This achievement is made possible by combining ePMR (energy-assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) with UltraSMR, and by the fact that the HC690 is the first hard drive to operate with 11 individual platters.

ePMR uses additional energy to make the writing process on hard drives more precise and to increase storage density by storing data vertically on the surface of the drive. Using SMR, data is written on overlapping tracks on the hard drive to fit more data in the same physical space, which also results in an increase in storage capacity.

Western Digital

While these technologies offer higher storage capacity and efficiency, they tend to be slower when writing data and are better suited for "Write Once, Read Many" scenarios, where data is rarely overwritten, but less ideal for workloads with frequent writing operations. Therefore, they are particularly suitable for archiving massive amounts of video data. Western Digital is also targeting the new drives for storing training data for AI systems and their output in large data centers.

The 32TB Ultrastar DC HC690 comes with either SATA or SAS interface options and offers sequential transfer rates of up to 257 MB/s, consuming only 5.5W when idle. In addition to the 32TB UltraSMR version, Western Digital also offers the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC590, a hard drive based on CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) technology, with a sustained transfer rate of 288 MiB/s and an idle power consumption of 5.6W.

more infos at bei www.westerndigital.com

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