While Helium-filled HDDs continue to push the capacity envelope, air-based solutions, too, are seeing great advancements to help fulfill the world's hunger for data and growing performance demands. Our R&D teams are pushing the boundaries of what's possible for HDDs while continuing to drive lower $/TB. Today Western Digital is excited to add the 10 TB Ultrastar DC HC330 HDD to its DC HC300 family.

The new Ultrastar DC HC330 is based on our proven and mature HC300 family of products, and if you have already qualified other capacity points in this family, you now have a very simple migration path, and best possible TCO within the HC300 family with the 10 TB HDD product. Furthermore, at 10 TB, the Ultrastar DC HC330 provides you with the same capacity as our previous Helium-based 10 TB, but uses fewer disks and heads to deliver even better value.For our OEM customers, this will enable you to provide an even broader range of system options and price points to better serve your traditional IT customers, who will now be able to scale capacities even more effectively for a variety of mid-cap enterprise applications. This is particularly beneficial for storage servers, traditional RAID arrays, and distributed storage systems like Apache Hadoop clusters.

Up to 40% Performance Improvements with Media Cache Plus
Compared to our 10 TB Helium drive (Ultrastar DC HC510), the Ultrastar DC HC330 provides up to 40% performance gains on low queue depth, small block random writes. These performance improvements are possible with the addition of the Media Cache Plus feature, which was previously only available on the SAS SKUs of the Ultrastar DC HC510, but is now featured on every SKU of the Ultrastar DC HC300 family.

Our existing Media Cache feature added many small media cache locations on the disk itself. Now we've also added a flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) that improves random write performance when the queue depth is low or the transfer length is short. It is the usage of NVC that is the 'Plus' in 'Media Cache Plus.'

This enhancement in performance coupled with Western Digital's expertise in areal density enables us to offer a faster 6 disk 10 TB HDD than competing 7 disk 10 TB HDD solutions on the market. These advantages can enable you to scale up capacities faster, which results in lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Key Security Features to Protect Enterprise Data
Controlling and securing data is critical. The Ultrastar DC HC330 incorporates a variety of key security features suited for enterprise applications. One of which is Dual Safe RSA-signed firmware, which means the drive keeps a backup copy of the firmware to prevent accidental data loss if a power loss event happens during a firmware update. Additionally, using our RSA-signed firmware prevents the use of rogue firmware from hijacking your device.

To help protect data from unauthorized use, both SAS and SATA models of the Ultrastar DC HC330 offer hardware-based encryption options. The SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) option combines the Sanitize Crypto Scramble / Erase functionality and TCG-Enterprise encryption (Trusted Computing Group, Enterprise SSC). Additionally, a FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validated model will be offered in a SAS configuration.

Reliability Leadership
Finally, The Ultrastar DC HC330 extends our long-standing tradition of reliability leadership with a 2 million-hour MTBF rating, workloads up to 550 TB per year, and a 5-year limited warranty.

Availability
The Ultrastar DC HC330 is expected to ship in September.