Designed with OptiNAND Technology

Western Digital has launched the world’s highest capacity hard drives in the form of 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR and 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDDs at its inaugural “What’s Next Western Digital Event” in San Francisco. The company also announced a new family of high-capacity solid state drives that deliver unbeatable performance at scale while reducing TCO for public cloud deployments.

Both, new WD HDDs are built with SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology and leverages 3D TLC NAND with PCIe Gen 4 support. The 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 and 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDDs uses most of WD’s cutting-edge technologies, including ePMR, TSA, HelioSeal, UltraSMR and OptiNAND to improve performance and meet large data storage challenges. 

New drives to drive scale

Western Digital Hard Drives have been industry leaders when it comes to cost-effective storage of data at scale. The 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 and 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 providing 18% increase in capacity that will allow cloud customers to scale the performance while keeping TCO manageable.

“Everything we do starts with the belief in human potential as it intersects digital innovation, and in turn, creates possibility,” Western Digital CEO David Goeckeler said in a comment prior to the event. “This possibility is fueled by a technology platform that the world’s innovators are building on and enabling the best new experiences — intelligent devices, powered by the cloud, connected by high-performance networks. We have only scratched the surface on the value of data and the technologies that unlock it.”

22TB UltraStar DC HC570 with CMR

The 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 is the industry’s first largest capacity hard disk drive which is specially built for data centers and cloud providers. The hdd is integrated with EAMR, TSA, HelioSeal and host-managed SMR technologies with to deliver 11% more capacity than enterprise-grade hard drives. 

An additional magnetic disk is used in the Western Digital UltraStar DC HC570 compared to its predecessor, which increases the capacity from 20 TB to 22 TB. A total of ten platters, each with 2.2 TB of storage space, find room in the 3.5-inch chassis, resulting in around 1.1 terabits per square inch.

26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 with UltraSMR

The Western Digital UltraStar DC HC670 26TB HDD comes with many unique features such as advanced error correction algorithm that increases the number of tracks per inch (TPI). This new Ultrastar DC HC670 is the the first highest capacity HDD in the industry to harness Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) technology that enables higher media precision and therefore increased areal density.

Western Digital claimed that their latest technologies will allow these high performance HDDs with a storage capacity of 30 TB and more. The performance is expected to improve with time, as WD continues to work on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, which tapes the tiny laser to the writing head to make the surface of the platter respond to the magnetic effects. 

Prices and Availability:

These two new highest capacity hard drives from Western Digital named 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 and 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 will be available in the summer of 2022, but probably not in regular stores. However, these hard disk drives have already shipping to selected customers.

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What is the difference between SMR and CMR Hard Drives?