Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB 3.5" 7200 RPM 512MB SATA 0F38462

Enterprise 16 TB SATA drive

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 is a 16 TB hard drive built for enterprise storage arrays and servers. It uses a standard 3.5-inch form factor and spins at 7200 RPM with a 512 MB cache. The drive employs conventional magnetic recording technology for broad compatibility with existing capacity-focused applications. It is suited for data centres that need high-density bulk storage on a proven platform.

SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface limits

The drive connects through a SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface, which caps sustained throughput well below the media transfer rate of the platters. Sequential reads and writes will saturate the link before the mechanical subsystem reaches its peak. Random I/O performance is constrained by rotational latency and the command overhead of the AHCI protocol. Systems that require higher queue depths or lower latency should evaluate a different interface technology.

16 TB capacity and headroom

Sixteen terabytes provides substantial space for archival workloads, backup targets and cold-tier object stores. The HelioSeal helium-filled design and energy-assisted magnetic recording help maintain reliability at this density. Workloads that demand sustained write bandwidth beyond the SATA bottleneck or sub-millisecond access times will exceed the practical limits of this drive class. Applications needing more capacity per slot must wait for higher-density models.