Western Digital and Dropbox Team to Accelerate Deployment of Leading-Edge Cloud Infrastructure

Western Digital has announced that Dropbox is one of the first to qualify the Ultrastarâ DC HC650 20TB, host-managed, shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drives (HDD).  

The company says with Western Digital SMR HDDs serving as the storage foundation for its custom-built, multi-exabyte storage platforms, Dropbox can continues its strategic path, taking advantage of the highest storage densities with the lowest TCO without sacrificing data durability and availability for its 600 million+ online customers.

Andrew Fong, vice president of engineering, Dropbox says they’ve been working with Western Digital for many years. 

 “Online tools and services are more important than ever before, so we need to be able to quickly innovate, expand functionality and scale to help stay competitive. We look forward to deploying these higher capacity 20TB SMR hard drives to further our cost savings and to provide our customers with even more value.”

Featuring the highest capacity in the industry, cloud and enterprise customers recognize the benefits of SMR HDDs and are adopting the technology to contend with the massive growth in data. 

Several complementary technology innovations are featured in the Ultrastar DC HC650, including the industry’s first energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) implementation, the industry’s first triple-stage actuator and the fifth generation of HelioSeal technology.

Western Digital SMR HDDs are also an integral part of Zoned Storage, an open-source, standards-based initiative building upon the synergies of SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs that enables data centers to scale efficiently.