Mid-capacity Drives

The Ultrastar DC HC300-series provides low to mid-capacity drives that are economical to acquire, yet deliver quick and reliable data access for traditional data center applications.

Economical Capacities and Fast Data Access Key Requirements for HDDs in the Data Center

IT managers need to offer storage tiers as they deploy purpose-built solutions to meet their on-prem, off-prem & cloud storage requirements.  While helium filled drives enable the highest capacities, air-filled drives offer important benefits.  With a lower TCA (total cost of acquisition), legacy options, and higher access density (IOPs/TB), they are the perfect choice for maintaining a desired level of performance while allowing customers to tailor budgets to meet their needs. The Ultrastar® DC HC300-series help to address data center requirements by providing capacities from 4TB to 10TB¹ while increasing performance over prior generations.  They are designed for a variety of applications including traditional storage arrays, rack-mounted storage enclosures and server-based distributed storage systems, as well as distributed and scalable computing, including block and file storage architectures.  They are offered at 7,200 RPM with either 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interface in Advanced Format 4Kn and 512e format⁴. A 512n option is also available on 4TB models to support legacy systems with native 512-byte block sizes.

Technology Innovation Delivers Efficiency and Performance for Traditional and Legacy Systems

Ultrastar DC HC300-series are based on a proven and cost-efficient air-based HDD platform design, with Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology in a 3.5-inch large form factor.  These HDDs leverage common hardware and firmware while featuring a second-generation, dual-stage microactuator to enhance head positioning accuracy for better drive performance.  Write performance gains are also supported by Western Digital’s media cache architecture, a disk-based caching technology that provides a large cache area on the disk, improving reliability and data integrity. Finally, the addition of a flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) on both SATA and SAS models helps improve write performance.

1. One megabyte (MB) is equal to one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1,000MB (one billion bytes), and one terabyte (TB) is equal to 1,000GB

2. MTBF and AFR specifications are based on a sample population and are estimated by statistical measurements and acceleration al-gorithms under typical operating conditions for this drive model. MTBF and AFR ratings do not predict an individual drive’s reliability and do not constitute a warranty.

3. Advanced Format drive: 4K (4096-byte) physical sec

4. 512e models can be converted to 4Kn format and vice versa.

5. Portion of buffer capacity used for drive firmware

6. Peak values.  Actual performance may vary. 1MiB = 1,048,576 bytes (220), 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes (106)

7. SATA models: Random RW 50/50 8KB QD=1 @40 IOPS  SAS models: Random RW 50/50 4KB QD=4 @Max IOPS

8. Idle specification is based on use of Idle A