Western Digital is one of the most well-known companies for storage solutions. With the latest NAS products we searched for a new HDD that would need our needs and for that purpose we chosen the WD UltraStar DC HC550 16TB. Today we will examine its performance specifications and if it’s a good or not product for you to buy.

Starting with the specs, Western Digital has many different product lines for its NAS servers and for the 16TB area, WDC offers three series, the Red Pro, Gold and UltraStar series

According to the specs, the Gold and UltraStar series look very similar at specs, workload rate and the UltraStar series is slight cheaper. According to WikiPedia, the UltraStar brand was originally introduced by IBM in 1994 for HDDs and was adopted and renamed to "HGST Ultrastar" by HGST after it acquired IBM's HDD business in 2003. Western Digital continued using the HGST prefix for a while after it acquired HGST in 2012 but the HGST prefix is now defunct. Some Ultrastar HDDs were sold under both HGST and WD branding (e.g. the HGST Ultrastar He10 and WD Ultrastar HC510 are the same models of HDD). These drives are typically used with enterprise computer systems. Current HDD models are offered with capacities up to 20 TB and with SATA or SAS interfaces

As WDC states: Data center decisions are driven by TCO. Higher capacity hard drives play a leading role in reducing TCO. An 18TB data center internal hard drive provides 29% more capacity in the same form factor as a 14TB HDD. Higher capacity HDDs enable data centers to lower CapEx by reducing supporting hardware and system level costs when compared to lower capacity drives. Helium-sealed, low power, high reliability drives reduce energy and maintenance costs, contributing to OpEx savings. For example, a data center using 18TB HDDs vs. 14TB HDDs can require 22% fewer racks while consuming 21% less power per TB at idle, resulting in significant overall TCO reduction for data center environments.

Ultrastar DC HC550 integrates a suite of technologies on a 9-disk platform to create a new class of HDDs. 18TB capacity is achieved by combining technologies that improve areal density working together with technologies that improve performance and reduce power consumption.

- The first internal hard drives in the industry to harness Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) technology improves writability and therefore increases areal density.
- The industry’s first Triple Stage Actuator (TSA) enhances head-positioning accuracy, delivering better performance and increased areal density.
- HelioSeal® technology is the foundation for Western Digital’s high capacity HDDs and this is the 6th generation of HelioSeal product. Western Digital has shipped >65 million HelioSeal products to date.

With its massive capacity and 2.5M MTBF (projected) reliability rating, the Ultrastar DC HC550 is ideal for object storage implementations. Object storage systems with erasure coding provide better data durability compared to RAID systems, given their tolerance for simultaneous error conditions.

The DC HC550 offers security and encryption options to help protect data from unauthorized use, including SED models in both SATA & SAS. A SED-FIPS will be available in a SAS configuration.

Trust Western Digital and the Ultrastar DC HC550 hard drive to deliver highest capacity, lower TCO and more value to your data center.

Highlights

• 16TB capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor
• CMR technology works with all capacity enterprise applications & environments
• Reliable, field-proven, 6th generation design
• Industry’s first HDD with Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology
• Industry’s first Triple Stage Actuator
• HelioSeal® design delivers outstanding power efficiency
• 2.5M hours (projected) MTBF² rating & 5-year limited warranty
• Self-Encrypting Drive Options

Applications

• Cloud & Hyperscale storage
• Massive scale-out (MSO), high-density data centers
• Distributed File Systems
• Bulk storage using object storage solutions like Ceph™ and OpenStack® Swift
• Primary and secondary storage for Apache Hadoop® for Big Data Analytics

- Retail package

The UltraStar DC HC550 16TB series come in an antistatic bag with a label containing all the needed info. Our drive was manufactured at September 2022 and no newer firmware update was available by the time of this review. After connecting the HDD to the system, we formatted the disk and we users can expect 14.5TB useable free space.

The ClystalDiskInfo software gives us more information. As we can see the device is recognized as WUH721816ALE6L4.