(iTers News) – HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced that it is shipping its new MegaScale DC 4000.B, a 3.5-inch, 4TB, 6 Gb/s SATA hard disk drive (HDD). As the company’s second-generation MegaScale drive, the new MegaScale DC 4000.B has been further optimized based on customer feedback to meet the explosive growth of infrequently accessed data, while balancing the right mix of power, capacity, performance and reliability.
As part of a tiered storage strategy, the MegaScale DC 4000.B is designed for low-workload applications such as bulk storage for unstructured or big data, disk-to-disk backup, online archives, or long-term data retention where cost-per-GB, watt-per-GB and GB-per-square foot are critical parameters.
“With the explosive adoption of free email, social networks and Internet services, the capacity requirements for cloud and hyperscale data centers are growing astronomically. These environments are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and the bottom line,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “As a leading drive supplier to some of the world’s largest cloud data center providers, we understand the demanding storage requirements for low workload applications in these hyperscale environments. With the MegaScale DC 4000.B, we’re delivering massive capacity in a low-power, performance-optimized drive to help customers achieve superior capital savings, operational efficiencies and energy conservation in the data center.”
The Right Drive for the Right Workload
Not all hard drives are created equal. When selecting a SAS or SATA “enterprise capacity” HDD, it’s important to consider the application and the drive’s intended workload. Depending on the workload, each application requires specific HDDs to meet certain performance, capacity, availability, footprint and economic parameters. To ensure optimal efficiency, it’s critical that data center managers make informed decisions when selecting the right storage design with the right specifications for the right application workload.
The MegaScale DC 4000.B HDD with CoolSpin performance is ideal for 24/7 low-workload environments that operate within 180TB per year. These environments are characterized by being low-cost, high density and having moderate performance, and must be able to scale efficiently and deploy vast amounts of storage with the best TCO to help manage capacity, power, cooling and storage density.
In comparison, the HGST’s premium Ultrastar 7K4000 drives feature 7,200 RPM performance and the industry’s highest MTBF specification at 2 million hours. Used in cloud and corporate data centers around the world, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family sets the benchmark for 7,200 RPM high-performance, high-quality and high-reliability in workloads that operate within 550TB/year. The drives are specifically designed for 24x7 capacity-optimized enterprise applications such as RAID, storage arrays, cloud storage, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations where performance, reliability and storage density are critical.
“IT managers know that rapidly growing data in their data centers have a range of data access time and transfer speed requirements," said John Rydning, research vice president, IDC. "HDD manufacturers are providing a variety of high capacity HDDs designed for various application workloads, including HGST's new MegaScale 4TB drive, to help IT managers realize total cost of ownership objectives over the life of the system.”