Western Digital
Ultrastar DC HC550 SATA 18TB Server Hard Drive (WUH721818ALE6L4)

Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550

Highlights

• 18/16TB capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor
• CMR technology works with all capacity enterprise applications & environments
• Reliable, field-proven, 6th generation design
• Industry’s first HDD with Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology
• Industry’s first Triple Stage Actuator
• HelioSeal design delivers outstanding power efficiency
• 2.5M hours (projected) MTBF rating & 5-year limited warranty
• Self-Encrypting Drive Options

Applications

• Cloud & Hyperscale storage
• Massive scale-out (MSO), 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

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Drives the Data Center Architecture

Data center decisions are driven by TCO. Higher capacity hard drives play a leading role in reducing TCO. An 18TB data center HDD provides 29% more capacity in the same form factor as a 14TB HDD. Higher capacity HDDs enable data centers to lower CapEx by reducing supporting 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, resulting in significant overall TCO reduction for data center environments.

Raising the Capacity Bar with New Technologies

Ultrastar DC HC550 integrates a suite of technologies on a 9-disk platform to create a new class of HDDs. 18TB capacity is achieved by combining technologies that improve areal density working together with technologies that improve performance and reduce power consumption.

• The first HDD in the industry to harness Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) technology improves writability and therefore increases areal density.
• The industry’s first Triple Stage Actuator (TSA) enhances head-positioning accuracy, delivering better performance and increased areal density.
• HelioSeal technology is the foundation for Western Digital’s high capacity HDDs and this is the 6th generation of HelioSeal product. Western Digital has shipped >65 million HelioSeal products to date.

Trusted Reliability and Quality for Data at Scale

With its massive capacity and 2.5M MTBF (projected) reliability rating, the Ultrastar DC HC550 is ideal 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 & SAS. A SED-FIPS will be available in a SAS configuration.

Trust Western Digital and the Ultrastar DC HC550 hard drive to deliver highest capacity, lower TCO and more value to your data center.