Western Digital Now Sampling World’s First 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR Hard Disk Drives
December 20 2019 - 1:30PM
Business Wire
Company Continues its Leadership in
High-Capacity Enterprise HDDs, Delivering Unprecedented TCO Value,
Enabling Customers to Efficiently Scale their Data Centers for the
Zettabyte Age
News Highlights:
- 20TB 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.
- The 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.
- New 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.
- Capacity Enterprise HDDs continue to offer the best customer
TCO value for online data storage at scale.
Western 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.
With 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
Western Digital achieves the industry’s highest areal density
performance in these drives through the innovative use of
energy-assisted magnetic recording. Together with the company’s
HelioSeal and SMR technologies, triple-stage micro actuation and
9-disk platform, the energy-assisted recording technology provides
an integrated solution, resulting in the dramatic gain in drive
capacities.
“The market outlook for capacity-optimized enterprise HDDs
remains very positive as IDC expects petabytes shipped to
hyperscale cloud data centers and for OEM storage systems and
servers to grow at a combined compound annual growth rate of 28%
through 2023,” said Ed Burns, Research Director, HDD and Storage
Technologies at IDC. “Western Digital’s new 20TB and 18TB HDDs
should make a compelling case for customers to transition to higher
capacity points as they seek greater storage and energy
efficiencies in the near-term while building more cost-effective
and scalable infrastructures for the future.”
“Delivering samples of our Ultrastar 20TB SMR and 18TB CMR HDDs
marks a significant milestone for Western Digital—demonstrating our
enduring commitment to the open SMR-based ecosystem, as well as our
strong track record of innovation to provide great value for our
customers,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general
manager of Western Digital’s Data Center Business Unit. “These new
HDDs deliver unsurpassed capacity and are our first to leverage
energy-assisted magnetic recording technology, enabling new levels
of data center efficiency and driving value creation from data at
scale.”
Availability
Western Digital is now sampling the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR
HDD and the 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD, with qualification and
volume shipments expected in the first half of 2020.
Resources:
SMR: What we learned in our first year One Year Later…Dropbox
Continues to Innovate with Western Digital
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About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. As a
leader in data infrastructure, the company is driving the
innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and
transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data
lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal
devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities
of data. Our data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western
Digital®, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, and WD® brands.
1TCO savings based on Western Digital calculations of typical
system component and operations costs of a 4U 100 HDD system as of
12/2019.
As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) =
1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Accessible capacity may be less depending
on operating environment.
© 2019 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights
reserved.
Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology,
SanDisk, WD, HelioSeal, and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or
trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the
US and/or other countries. All other marks are the property of
their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change
without notice. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. Not
all products will be available in all regions of the world.
Forward-Looking
Statements
This news release contains forward-looking statements that
involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to,
statements regarding market positioning; product features, cost and
availability; and market trends. Forward-looking statements should
not be read as a guarantee of future results, and will not
necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which
such results will be achieved, if at all. Forward-looking
statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause
actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or
suggested by the forward-looking statements.
Key risks and uncertainties include volatility in global
economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage
ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; actions by
competitors; unexpected advances in competing technologies; our
development and introduction of products based on new technologies
and expansion into new data storage markets; difficulties or delays
in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the
company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the
“SEC”) and available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov, including
our most recently filed periodic report, to which your attention is
directed. We do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or
revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new
information, future developments or otherwise, except as required
by law.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191220005512/en/
Company contacts: Erin Hartin Western Digital Public
Relations 303-601-8035 erin.hartin@wdc.com
Peter Andrew Western Digital Investor Relations 1-800-695-6399
investor@wdc.com
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