Western Digital 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 SATA HDD now on Bhphoto Store

At the end of 2019, Western Digital Corporation began shipping trial samples of 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 SATA HDD for the enterprise segment. Their release was announced in September 2019, and now the new Western Digital HDD is available to buy on the Bhphoto store. 

This Internal HDD uses CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) technology, in which data is stored in parallel tracks without overlap, which occurs in the case of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology. Overlapping can increase the recording density but negatively impact performance metrics. In addition to CMR, Western Digital uses Energy-Assisted Magnetic

Recording technology for recording (actually EAMR technology, not CMR). These new technologies combined with further mechanical innovations and HelioSeal technology provide the industry’s highest capacities to enable data at scale with optimized TCO for data center architectures while maintaining workload reliability and performance. The WD drive is available in SATA and SAS versions. The containment area contains nine plates rotating at a speed of 7200 rpm. The 512MB DRAM buffer can improve performance.

Features

• Up to 18TB capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor
• Industry’s first Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology
• Industry’s first Triple Stage Actuator
• Leading HelioSeal technology
• Reliable, field-proven design across five generations
• HelioSeal design delivers power efficiency (Watts/TB)
• 2.5M hours MTBF rating and a 5-year limited warranty
• 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
• Surveillance Analytics

Price and availability

Western Digital 18TB Ultrastar DC HC550 SATA HDD costs $559.99 and is now available to purchase on the Bhphotovideo.com website and it comes with a five-year warranty.

Western Digital recently also introduced a new WD My Passport SSD that can achieve speeds of up to 1,050 MB/s via USB 3.2 Gen 2 and a write speed of up to 1,000 MB/s.