Stefan Mileschin

Western Digital has introduced its new top-of-the-range air-filled hard drive for enterprises that use storage servers, RAID arrays, and distributed storage. The Ultrastar DC HC330 HDD expands the capacities that Western Digital offers for this market segment to 10 TB and also introduces the company’s Media Cache Plus technology that promises to improve write performance by up to 40% in certain cases.

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC330 is the latest addition to the company’s Ultrastar DC HC300-series family that includes 4, 6, and 8 TB hard drives (that were originally introduced under different model numbers). While these hard drives are classified as ‘datacenter’ devices, they are aimed at enterprises that need loads of storage space and high performance, but not those operating large datacenters that require maximum capacities. All the HDDs in the lineup are based on the company’s enterprise-class platform that uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR, which refers to perpendicular magnetic recording in this case) featuring appropriate reliability and durability enhancements (e.g., bottom and top attached motors, RAFF technology to protect against vibration, dual-stage micro actuator to improve positioning, etc.).

The Ultrastar DC HC330 10 TB air-filled hard drives rely on six 1.66-TB CMR platters (the highest-capacity commercially available platters in the industry today), down from seven 1.42 TB PMR disks in case of the helium-filled Ultrastar He10. The HDDs use a motor featuring a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 256 MB buffer, and will be offered with a SATA 6 Gbps or a SAS 12 Gbps interface as well as 4 KB and 512E sectors.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14665...-faster-writes