HGST Shipping 6Gb SATA 3.5-Inch 4TB MegaScale DC

HGST, a Western Digital company, is shipping its MegaScale DC 4000.B, a 3.5-inch, 4TB, 6 Gb SATA 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 growth of infrequently accessed data, while balancing the mix of power, capacity, performance and reliability.

As part of a tiered storage strategy, it 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-gigabyte, watt-per-gigabyte and gigabyte-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, VP 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.”

Right Drive for Right Workload
Not all HDDs 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 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 7,200rpm performance and MTBF specification at 2 million hours. Used in cloud and corporate data centers around the world, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family sets the benchmark for 7,200rpm high-performance, high-quality and high-reliability in workloads that operate within 550TB/year. The drives are specifically designed for 24×7 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 VP, 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 TCO objectives over the life of the system.”

Below is a chart that shows different characteristics and features by HGST Ultrastar and MegaScale drive families:

MegaScale DC 4000.B HDD
Targeting 24/7 low workloads that operate within 180TB per year, it is rated at 800K MTBF, and offers specifications of 1 in 1014 non-recoverable bit error rate and 300K load/unload cycles. It features a Dual Stage Actuator (DSA) and Enhanced Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology for performance, better stability and more reliability in rack-mount drive bays and servers. It offers 33% more capacity than 3TB HDDs and supports 512e Advanced Format for custom data center environments.

The 4TB MegaScale DC 4000.B also features HGST’s CoolSpin technology that delivers optimized performance with low power for data centers looking to reduce their environmental impact and improve energy efficiency in terms of power usage, cooling and storage density footprint. Utilizing CoolSpin technology, the drive uses up to 45% less operating power and 29% reduced idle power when compared to current 4TB 7,200rpm drives, which can mean cost savings for data center customers. The MegaScale DC 4000.B also offers five levels of Advanced Power Management around power consumption including: normal idle, unload idle, low rpm idle, standby, and sleep. The standby and sleep modes consume less than one watt per drive to help ensure that archival applications remain online and response-ready, at the most eco-friendly power levels.

It also comes with optional bulk data encryption (BDE) with enhanced secure erase technology for added data security, and easy and safe HDD redeployment.

The 4TB MegaScale DC 4000.B is shipping and comes with a three-year limited warranty.