Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC590 26TB SATA Enterprise HDD

The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC590 is a 26TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) enterprise hard disk drive built on Western Digital's ninth-generation HelioSeal platform, hermetically sealed with helium to reduce internal drag and enable higher platter density at lower power draw. Featuring nine platters spinning at 7,200 RPM with an enhanced read/write head design, the HC590 delivers up to 272 MB/s sustained transfer rate, making it one of the highest-capacity SATA enterprise HDDs available for data-center deployment. The drive connects via a 6 Gb/s SATA interface and carries a 2.5 million hours MTBF rating alongside a 550 TB/year workload rating, reflecting its positioning as a workhorse for write-intensive, large-scale storage environments.

The HC590 (WUH722426ALE6L4) is engineered specifically for hyperscale and enterprise data centers where rack-level capacity density and total cost of ownership per terabyte are primary design constraints. Its CMR recording geometry ensures full compatibility with all standard RAID controllers, host-managed SMR enclosures, and conventional file systems without requiring specialized host software stacks. The drive incorporates a 512 MB DRAM cache buffer, rotational vibration (RV) sensors for multi-drive enclosure stability, and supports SATA DevSleep power mode to accommodate power-tiering strategies in high-density JBOD shelves.

Targeted at cold and warm data tiers including object storage, backup repositories, archival data lakes, and content repositories, the Ultrastar DC HC590 integrates seamlessly into OpenStack Swift, Ceph RADOS, and Hadoop-compatible infrastructure. Western Digital rates the drive at a 0.35% annualized failure rate (AFR), and the drive ships in both standard and ISE (Instant Secure Erase) variants to satisfy data-sanitization compliance requirements under frameworks such as NIST 800-88. The 3.5-inch form factor and standard SATA power connector ensure broad compatibility across existing enterprise chassis without mechanical or electrical retooling.

Ideal for

• Hyperscale object storage nodes (e.g., OpenStack Swift, MinIO) requiring maximum raw capacity per rack unit at 7,200 RPM throughput
• Enterprise backup and recovery appliances where high sequential write bandwidth and large per-drive capacity reduce the total drive count and associated failure-rate exposure
• Cold and nearline data lake tiers in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or cloud-adjacent on-premises repositories where data is accessed infrequently but must be retrievable at full disk speed
• Video surveillance and media asset storage platforms accumulating continuous high-bitrate streams across dozens of concurrent channels
• Large-scale NAS arrays and SAN expansion shelves in research, genomics, and scientific computing environments where datasets routinely exceed petabyte scale
• Compliance and regulatory archival vaults requiring ISE (Instant Secure Erase) capability for end-of-life data sanitization without physical drive destruction

Technical specifications

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