WD today announced the WD Ultrastar DC HC620 Host-Managed HDD with a capacity of 15TB. The large capacity is possible thanks to helium and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. The drives are available in both a SATA and SAS version.
With 15TB the drive is 1TB larger than the previously largest commercially available hard disk drive. It's not entirely clear how WD achieves the higher capacity but it's likely the SMR tracks are closer to each other than in the company's 14TB drives.
The Ultrastar DC HC620 uses host-managed SMR, which is an implementation where the storage software has to make sure data is optimized for writing to SMR zones. WD targets the disk for cloud and hyper scale data center usage.
As usual with Ultrastar series HDDs, the drive is available in either a model utilizing the SATA interface and a model utilizing the SAS interface. WD also makes the drive available with different sector-sizes.
The Ultrastar DC HC620 also has 512MB of cache memory and spins at 7,200 round per minute enabling a maximum data transfer of 255MB/s.
WD has not provided any pricing and availability information.
