The manufacturer of storage solutions, Western Digital, has just presented its new mechanical hard drive Ultrastar DC HC620, which becomes the first of its category to have an internal storage capacity of 15 TB. These new models have been developed to be used in companies that require ample data storage space, such as servers in the cloud.
Although we are seeing a steady development of data storage technologies in the segment of solid state drives, currently the leading voice in terms of storage capacity and price per GB, it continues to carry the traditional mechanical hard drives. This is why this type of devices are usually the kings of the server farms, since they allow a large amount of space, at a fairly low cost, both for the users of the discs themselves, and for the users that require them to store their data.
The new Ultrastar DC HC620 is the latest model in the popular Ultrastar hard drive series of the Western Digital brand (formerly HGST), which are usually well-known models in the world of servers, given their extremely high reliability, as well as the low failure rate and replacements that their units have.
To achieve such a large internal storage capacity, Western Digital has chosen to use Helium filling inside this new model, which allows it to mount plates of smaller thickness, which in turn translates into a greater number of dishes per unit. Also, Western Digital has used in this new HC620, the SMR data recording system (Shingled Magnetic Recording) that allows to increase the data density in each dish up to 16% extra, if we compare it with the CMR method (Conventional Magnetic Recording) ).
As you can see from the previous image, where we quote and compare the technical characteristics of these new Western Digital hard drives, the sequential file transfer rate is a not insignificant 255 MB / s. Although, obviously, when the file transfers were not sequential, the performance would be much lower, given that, due to its type of internal architecture, mechanical hard drives are usually not very good at random searches.