The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 has a massive 15TB capacity

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 is intended or enterprise use and not consumer desktops or laptops.

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 is now the world’s largest capacity HDD at 15TB. The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 has “Shingled Magnetic Recording” and is also “helium-sealed” (whatever that means). Western Digital does a better job of explaining traditional “Conventional Magnetic Recording” versus “Shingled Magnetic Recording.”

Complementing the data center workload requirements of our Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) HDDs, which are meant for random reads and writes, this latest host-managed SMR HDD is optimized for sequential writes and areal density. It enables rack-level scale of higher-performance “sequentialized” workloads such as video surveillance, object storage, and cloud services. These emerging workloads for SMR optimization require data to be written sequentially and that is rarely updated, followed by random and frequent reads.

Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620

Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 is intended or enterprise use and not consumer desktops or laptops. Western Digital says one of the use cases for these new high-capacity hard drives is video surveillance in “safe cities.”

Safe city video surveillance initiatives are a prime use case example for the Ultrastar DC HC620 SMR HDD. Video surveillance produces a constant data stream, typically running 24×7, which requires the “sequentialized” writes, followed by random reads for processing and archive retrieval.In addition, there are safe cities surveillance initiatives that require large-scale, high-resolution 4k H.265 compression video with a minimum of 30 frames-per-second to avoid false positives. Storage requirements for just one 4k camera using H.265 at 30 fps storing footage for 180 days, can be 28TB as shown by the Western Digital Surveillance Storage Capacity Estimator.

When you combine this video resolution with hundreds or thousands of cameras and a typical 180-day retention period, having the best possible storage TCO is a must to help enable the realization of safe city surveillance initiatives.

 

So the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 is probably out of your grasp for now. But we’re sure the technology and capacity will come to consumer-grade HDDs at some point in the future. More often than not, tech that gets adopted for enterprise, does eventually assimilate into the consumer level. Check out the link below for more info on what this massive hard drive can do.


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