Showcasing its continued strength and leadership in enterprise-capacity storage solutions, Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) today announced the industry's highest capacity HDD, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 host-managed SMR HDD. The Ultrastar DC HC620 delivers an unprecedented capacity point with a time-to-market advantage for customers who have invested in, and continue to take advantage of the benefits of SMR.

"With data continuing to grow at unprecedented rates, many hyperscale and cloud storage customers know that their workloads trend toward data that is written sequentially. In these instances, customers are optimizing their infrastructures with the lowest TCO and the maximum capacity," said Eyal Bek, vice president of product marketing, Western Digital. "By capitalizing on our highest-capacity SMR storage solutions, our customers' investment can not only be fully leveraged today, but for subsequent generations of SMR areal density improvements for continued infrastructure optimization."

Setting a new bar for TCO, the Ultrastar 15TB host-managed SMR HDD is well positioned for hyperscale cloud and traditional data center workloads, including large video surveillance "smart city" initiatives, storage for regulatory compliance and Big Data storage. Enabling the world's densest server and storage systems, incorporating 15TB HDDs allows a fully populated 4U60 HDD enclosure to reach a raw storage capacity of 900TB, which is an additional 60TB per 4U rack in the same footprint compared to those utilizing 14TB HDDs. In an at-scale environment where floor space, $/TB, TB per square foot, or watts per terabyte are critical, this TCO savings can be significant.

Based on the company's proven HelioSeal® platform, and as an extension to the industry's first 14TB SMR HDD family, the 15TB enterprise-class Ultrastar DC HC620 host-managed SMR HDD reflects another industry first, continuing the company's tradition of delivering the highest capacity enterprise-class HDDs in the market. Western Digital is currently shipping Ultrastar DC HC620 qualification samples to select customers with broader availability later this quarter.

The new Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD further expands Western Digital's broad range of enterprise-class storage solutions, which include high-performance NVMe™ SSD devices, innovative HelioSeal^® enterprise-class hard disk drives as well as SAS and SATA SSDs. The company's data center systems include its ActiveScale™, IntelliFlash™, OpenFlex™, and Ultrastar® storage servers and platforms.

Western Digital blog: "Industry-Leading Enterprise HDD Capacity: 15TB SMR"

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Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. 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. Western Digital® data-centric solutions are marketed under the G-Technology™, HGST, SanDisk®, Tegile™, Upthere™, and WD® brands.

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the applications, benefits, capabilities, features and availability of the Ultrastar DC HC620. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: volatility in global economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance and cost of commodity materials and specialized product components; 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; risks associated with acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recently filed periodic report to which your attention is directed. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances change after the date of this release.

© 2018 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, SanDisk, Tegile, Upthere, WD, ActiveScale, HelioSeal, IntelliFlash, OpenFlex, and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. The NVMe word mark is a trademark of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.