Press release
Western Digital Now Sampling World’s First 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR Hard Disk Drives
Company Continues its Leadership in High-Capacity Enterprise HDDs, Delivering Unprecedented TCO Value, Enabling Customers to Efficiently Scale their Data
About this update from Western Digital Corporation
[{"type":"text","content":"\nCompany Continues its Leadership in High-Capacity Enterprise HDDs, Delivering Unprecedented TCO Value, Enabling Customers to Efficiently Scale their Data Centers for the Zettabyte Age \n\n\nNews Highlights: \n\n\n\n20TB Ultrastar® DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs are now sampling with a dozen enterprise OEMs and hyperscale cloud customers worldwide, including Dropbox.\n\n\nThe new Ultrastar HDDs feature Western Digital’s first commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology at scale, delivering unmatched areal density and storage efficiency with the proven quality and durability of Western Digital’s HelioSeal® Ultrastar HDDs.\n\n\nNew Ultrastar HDDs deliver immediate and long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) value for customers looking for the highest storage density, performance, and low power for designing more space-, cost- and energy-efficient data centers.\n\n\nCapacity Enterprise HDDs continue to offer the best customer TCO value for online data storage at scale.\n\n\n SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nWestern Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) announced that it has started shipping the industry’s highest-capacity HDD samples to enterprise OEMs and hyperscale customers worldwide. The 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs, first previewed in June 2019, and announced in September 2019, feature its first-ever commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology on a nine-disk platform, enabling customers to more efficiently provision and scale their data center environments with unmatched total cost of ownership.\n\n\nWith zettabyte-scale data growth, the need for higher-capacity data storage across a broad spectrum of applications and workloads can be reliably met only with high Capacity Enterprise HDDs. The industry-leading capacities of Western Digital’s Ultrastar 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR HelioSeal HDDs enable customers to deploy up to 22 percent fewer racks and reduce their TCO by up to 11 percent, along with the corresponding reductions in power consumption, cooling costs, and data center infrastructure needs when compared with today’s 14TB CMR HDDs.1\n\n\nWestern Digital achieves the industry’s highest areal density performance in these drives through the innovative use of energy-assisted magnetic recording. Together with the c...