Western Digital Unveils the First 32TB HDD

Western Digital just unveiled the DC HC690, an ePMR UltraSMR HDD with a 32TB capacity. It's the largest hard drive to date, but it's not something you'd want to put in your PC.

The Ultrastar DC HC690 was first teased at a Western Digital earnings call in August 2024. Its record-breaking capacity stems from WD's UltraSMR technology, which was previously utilized in the company's 28TB DC HC680 drive.

UltraSMR is an advanced, proprietary version of traditional Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). It contains some neat data-integrity protection technology, though we're mainly interested in UltraSMR's use of energy-assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR), a writing method that substantially increases a drive's areal density (the amount of usable surface area on a drive's internal platters). Each platter in the DC HC690 holds 2.90TB of data—it uses a somewhat unusual 11-platter design—so there's a total of 32TB.

A ton of storage is usually a blessing. But the DC HC690 is a hard drive. It's slow, offering sustained read-write speeds of 257MBps. It would take about two days of continuous data transfer to offload or rebuild this drive. Consumers or hobbyists who need a ridiculous amount of storage for a home server or database may be better off with an array of smaller drives, as they'll provide a higher effective transfer rate than a single, massive, slow HDD. For its part, Western Digital is marketing the DC HC690 as an enterprise-grade product for AI data centers.

I should point out that Seagate is also developing a 32TB HDD with ePMR technology. The company expects to build 120TB HDDs by the end of the decade, though it's yet to reveal a working 32TB drive.

You can't buy the Ultrastar DC HC690 today, as it's currently limited to enterprise customers. However, Western Digital is selling a 26TB enterprise-class HDD to anyone who wants to buy it.

Source: Western Digital via Android Central