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