TCO and Access Speed: Key Requirements for HDDs in the Data Center

As the industry evolves to deploying purpose-built solutions for growing data storage requirements, IT managers can rely on higher capacity HDDs to drive lower $/TB, yet require quick and reliable data access for data center applications. The Ultrastar® DC HC330 10TB hard drives help address these requirements by delivering high capacity storage with nearly 40% performance boost on low queue depth random writes over our prior generation 10TB HDD². This performance boost helps enable capacity scaling and unlocks lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The Ultrastar DC HC330 HDD is designed for a variety of applications including traditional storage arrays, rack-mounted storage enclosures and server based distributed storage systems. The Ultrastar DC HC330 provides fast 7,200 RPM spindle speeds and is offered in either 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interface.

Expanding our Ultrastar HC300 Family to 10TB

The Ultrastar DC HC330 is based on a proven and cost-efficient air-based HDD platform design utilizing six disks and conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology in a 3.5-inch large form factor. Compared to our prior 10TB product, the DC HC330 delivers the same capacity while using fewer disks. It leverages common hardware and firmware from the existing DC HC300 family of 4TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities and features a second-generation, dual-stage micro actuator to enhance head positioning accuracy for better drive performance. Write performance gains over the prior 10TB are enabled by an improved media cache architecture, that incorporates a flash backed DRAM cache in addition to the existing disk based caching technology that provides a large cache area on the disk media.

Data Security with Trusted Quality, Reliability

New government regulations on data privacy and security requirements drive the need for increased security features on storage devices. The Ultrastar DC HC330 helps protect data from unauthorized use by offering security and encryption options. Both SAS and SATA models offer hardware-based encryption options, which include both Sanitize Crypto Scramble / Erase functionality and TCG encryption (Trusted Computing Group, Enterprise SSC). Additionally, a FIPS 140–2 Level 2 verified model will be offered for SAS configurations. The Ultrastar DC HC330 extends Western Digital’s long-standing tradition of reliability leadership with a 2M-hour MTBF rating, workloads up to 550TB per year, and a 5 year limited warranty.