Chris Evans highlights the new king of HDD capacity, the 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 from Western Digital. While only representing a 7% increase in capacity from 14TB drives, the real innovation here is these drives use host-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording, as opposed to being managed directly on the drives. This has big implications for hyperscalers, who can see greatly improved performance. Dropbox is one of the initial customers to use the drives, and Chris got a deep dive into their “Magic Pocket” architecture at Storage Field Day earlier this year.
