Economical Capacities And Fast Data Access Key Requirements For HDDs In The Data Center

IT managers need to offer storage tiers as they deploy purpose-built solutions to meet their on-prem, off-prem & cloud storage requirements. While helium filled drives enable the highest capacities, air-filled drives offer important benefits. With a lower TCA (total cost of acquisition), legacy options, and higher access density (IOPs/TB), they are the perfect choice for maintaining a desired level of performance while allowing customers to tailor budgets to meet their needs. The Western Digital Ultrastar ^®  DC HC300-Series help to address data center requirements by providing capacities from 4TB to 10TB ¹  while increasing performance over prior generations. They are designed for a variety of applications including traditional storage arrays, rack-mounted storage enclosures and server-based distributed storage systems, as well as distributed and scalable computing, including block and file storage architectures. They are offered at 7,200 RPM with either 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interface in Advanced Format 4Kn and512e format ² . A 512n option is also available on 4TB models to support legacy systems with native 512-byte block sizes.

Technology Innovation Delivers Efficiency And Performance For Traditional And Legacy Systems

WD Ultrastar DC SAS and SATA HC3000-Series are based on a proven and cost-efficient air-based HDD platform design, with Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology in a 3.5-inch large form factor. These HDDs leverage common hardware and firmware while featuring a second-generation, dual-stage microactuator to enhance head positioning accuracy for better drive performance. Write performance gains are also supported by Western Digital’s media cache architecture, a disk-based caching technology that provides a large cache area on the disk, improving reliability and data integrity. Finally, the addition of a flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) on both SATA and SAS models helps improve write performance.