Economics and Access Speed: Key Requirements for Low Capacity HDDs in the Data Center

As the industry evolves to develop purpose-built solutions for growing data storage requirements, IT managers continue to rely on lower capacity drives that are economical to acquire, yet deliver quick and reliable data access for traditional data center applications. Designed to handle workloads up to 550TB per year, Ultrastar® DC HC320* is an 8TB HDD that helps address economic and access requirements of many traditional IT workloads. Low capacity drives also help address architecture limitations. Part of our mid-capacity DC HC300 series, the Ultrastar DC HC320 is designed for traditional storage and server applications as well as distributed and scalable computing, including block and file storage architectures, providing fast 7,200 RPM performance and lower acquisition cost to help ease budget constraints. Ultrastar DC HC320 is offered with either 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interface in a 512e format.

Technology Innovation Delivers Efficiency and Performance for Traditional IT Systems

Ultrastar DC HC320 is based on a proven 5-disk air platform design that uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology in a 3.5-inch large form factor. Compared to the prior generation, Ultrastar 7K6000, the DC HC320 delivers 33% more capacity, up to 12% performance boost and uses slightly larger-diameter media. It features a second-generation, dual-stage micro actuator to enhance head positioning accuracy for better drive performance. Write performance gains are also supported by Western Digital’s media cache architecture, a disk-based caching technology that provides a large cache area on the disk, which also improves reliability and data integrity during unexpected power loss. Finally, the addition of flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) on both SATA and SAS models helps improve write performance. The Ultrastar DC HC320 also includes a Rebuild Assist feature, which helps dramatically reduce RAID rebuild times and maintain system performance during the rebuild process. Learn more in our Rebuild Assist technical brief.

Data Security with Trusted Quality, Reliability

Compliance and privacy requirements drive the need for increased data security. Ultrastar DC HC320 helps protect data from unauthorized use by offering security and encryption options. Both SAS and SATA models offer hardware-based encryption options, which includes both Sanitize Crypto Scramble / Erase functionality and TCG encryption (Trusted Computing Group, Enterprise SSC). Additionally, SAS SED is also offered as a FIPS 140–2 Level 2 certified model. The Ultrastar DC HC320 extends Western Digital’s long-standing tradition of reliability leadership with a 2M-hour MTBF rating and a 5-year limited warranty.