WD 18TB UltraStar DC HC550 7200 rpm SATA III 3.5″ Internal HDD

The 18TB UltraStar DC HC550 7200 rpm SATA III 3.5″ Internal HDD from WD is a high-performance, large-capacity drive designed for enterprise environments that have intensive data and storage needs. This drive has a storage capacity of 18TB and a 3.5″ form factor with a SATA III 6 Gb/s interface, rotational speed of 7200 rpm, and 512MB cache that help to ensure uninterrupted data transfers at speeds of up 269 MB/s. As a professional-grade drive, it has an MTBF rating of 2.5 million hours, an Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of 0.35%, 600,000 load/unload cycles, an error rate of 1 in 10¹⁵ non-recoverable bits read, and a workload of up to 550TB per year, plus WD’s HelioSeal technology, which replaces the air inside the drive with helium. This allows for increased efficiency, reliability, and capacity, thanks to reduced vibration, improved areal density, cooler operating temperatures, and reduced power requirements.

General Features

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Drives the Data Center Architecture
Data center decisions are driven by TCO. Higher capacity hard drives play a role in reducing TCO. An 18TB data center HDD provides 29% more capacity than a 14TB HDD in the same form factor. Higher capacity HDDs enable data centers to lower CapEx by reducing hardware- and system-level costs when compared to lower capacity drives. Helium-sealed, low power, high-reliability drives reduce energy and maintenance costs, contributing to OpEx savings. For example, a data center using 18TB HDDs vs. 14TB HDDs requires 22% fewer racks while consuming 21% less power per TB at idle.

Raising the Bar with Advanced Technologies
The Ultrastar DC HC550 integrates a suite of technologies on a 9-disk platform to create a new class of HDDs. Its 18TB capacity is achieved by combining technologies that improve areal density with technologies that improve performance and reduce power consumption. It uses Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) technology to improve writability and increase areal density, while a Triple Stage Actuator (TSA) enhances head-positioning accuracy, delivering better performance and increased areal density. Lastly, this drive uses HelioSeal technology, which is now in its 6th generation.

Trusted Reliability and Quality for Data at Scale
With its massive capacity and 2.5 million hour MTBF reliability rating, the UltraStar DC HC550 is made for object storage implementations. Object storage systems with erasure coding provide better data durability compared to RAID systems, given their tolerance for simultaneous error conditions. The DC HC550 offers security and encryption options to help protect data from unauthorized use, including SED models in both SATA and SAS. A SED-FIPS will be available in SAS configuration.

Highlights

• 18TB in a standard 3.5″ form factor
• CMR technology works with all capacity enterprise applications and environments
• Reliable, field-proven, 6th generation design
• Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology
• Triple Stage Actuator
• HelioSeal design delivers outstanding power efficiency
• 2.5 million hours MTBF rating and a limited 5-year warranty
• Self-encrypting drive options
• Applications and Environments
• Cloud and hyperscale storage
• Massive scale-out (MSO) and high-density data centers
• Distributed file systems
• Bulk storage using object storage solutions like Ceph and OpenStack Swift
• Primary and secondary storage for Apache Hadoop for big data analytics