Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5-inch Helium Enterprise HDD

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC520 (model HUH721212ALE604) is a 12TB, 7200RPM enterprise-class 3.5-inch hard disk drive engineered for demanding datacenter environments. Built on Western Digital's HelioSeal platform, the drive is hermetically sealed with helium gas rather than air, reducing internal turbulence and enabling higher platter density while lowering power consumption per terabyte. The SATA 6Gb/s interface ensures broad platform compatibility across mainstream enterprise servers and storage arrays, and the 512e sector format supports modern operating system and file-system requirements without sacrificing compatibility with legacy infrastructure.

The HC520 delivers a sustained transfer rate of up to 255MB/s and is rated for a workload of 550TB per year, reflecting the endurance requirements of always-on datacenter operations. With a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours and an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.35%, the drive is designed for continuous 24×7 operation in high-density JBOD, NAS, SAN, and object storage enclosures. The 256MB cache buffer supports efficient handling of sequential and mixed I/O workloads typical of large-scale data repositories and content archives.

As part of Western Digital's Ultrastar DC product family, the HC520 targets hyperscale cloud deployments, enterprise backup and archive tiers, AI training data lakes, and surveillance or media repositories where capacity, reliability, and total energy efficiency are primary selection criteria. The helium-sealed design contributes to a lower operating power profile compared to equivalent air-filled drives, supporting datacenter operators in meeting rack-level power and thermal budgets across high-density storage deployments serving UAE, GCC, EMEA, and APAC regions.

Ideal for

• Hyperscale and cloud object storage nodes requiring maximum capacity per rack unit with predictable power consumption
• Enterprise backup-to-disk and long-term data archive tiers where sustained throughput and high workload endurance are essential
• AI and machine learning training data repositories that demand large, cost-efficient sequential read capacity for dataset ingestion
• High-density NAS and scale-out file storage deployments serving media, entertainment, and broadcast workflows
• Surveillance and security video storage platforms requiring continuous write operations across 24×7 recording cycles
• Cold and warm data tiering in multi-tier storage architectures where high-capacity SATA drives serve as a capacity tier below SSDs

Technical specifications

Available from Omnixon Global. Submit an RFQ and our team will confirm configuration and availability for your order.