WD Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review

Review of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive for NAS

The speed at which Hard Drive technology has evolved has been pretty crazy. Not so long ago, many highly respected journals and tech sites were signing the death warrant of Hard drives, largely down to the growing affordability of SSDs, NAND storage capacity and durability increasing and all the while HDDs plodding along with only relatively small improvements in their performance and cost. However, fast forward to 2022 and not only are HDDs still a ‘thing’ but, they continue to flourish! Why is this? Well, simply that the amount of data we as individuals and/or businesses is constantly increasing in volume, but so does the expected speed at which we demand access to it. SSDs give you great speed, but still cannot affordably match the price point per TB or even Petabyte of HDDs and in this world, a drive like the Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB hard drive is going to be perfect. Designed with large-scale data center deployment in mind, the HC560 is a monster of a hard disk that includes a large number of innovations by WD to improve stability, performance, access times and workloads compared with regular desktop or NAS class HDDs. So, today I want to discuss the new Western Digital DC HC560 20TB, what makes it different to a Pro class drive, who it is designed for, who it ISN’T designed for and ultimately help you decide if it deserves your data. Let’s go.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Quick Conclusion

The Western Digital DC HC560 does exactly what it sets out to achieve. This is an incredibly robust hard drive that you can tell WD has poured alot of that enterprise audience R&D into! The fact that it is 20TB is always going to be impressive, but the real draw here is that this high degree of storage capacity has been achieved, without SMR and without compromising it’s performance and use in a larger RAID environment. HDDs are still in popular industry use and until the ongoing demand for Large Affordable Capacity AND fast access continues, you can see why most popular hard drive brands are predicted to comfortably hit 50TB by the end of the decade. The Western Digital DC HC560 20TB hard disk is a great piece of engineering that continues to support the continued popularity of the Ultrastar series for large-scale data center use. However, it is REALLY important to understand WHY this drive is DC/Data-Center classed and not appropriate for the average home user looking to get big capacity in a single drive. For a start, the Western Digital DC HC560 is a noisy drive! Alongside a higher power consumption to keep this industrial drive running 24×7, it is a drive designed for exceptional fast power on/spin up, as well as having a nine spinning platters to dance between all the time, so it makes alot of humming, spinning, vibrating and clicking noises throughout it’s operations – in a data center, fulling populating a 24 bay rackmount, you won’t hear it. But in a modest home 2-4-Bay system, it sounds horrendous! Enterprise drives like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are designed for larger scale deployment and used in bulk (RAID configs), hence the lower price often when compared again NAS PRO drives like WD Red Pro. The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar is an exceptional Hyper-Scale storage hard drive, just don’t try to use it outside of those environments!

BUILD - 10/10

HARDWARE - 10/10

PERFORMANCE - 9/10

PRICE - 9/10

VALUE - 9/10

9.4

PROS

👍🏻20TB for under £400 (i.e £20 per Terabyte, when the general market cost if £25-30) is an absolute solid WIN
👍🏻Extremely well-constructed design
👍🏻7200 + 512MB Cache + OptiNAND = Great hardware base to work with
👍🏻Sustained performance in testing stayed above 250MB/s over extended periods
👍🏻550TB Annual Workload and 2.5 Million hr MTBF (even if you aren\'t impressed by the latter scale in 2022) is huge;y impressive
👍🏻Considerably more available to buy online that you would expect, considering its a Data Center HDD

CONS

👎🏻Noisy!
👎🏻Higher typical Power Use
👎🏻1x 20TB drive, when you factor RAID = A larger, long-term financial commitment to backups/redundancy (often overlooked)

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WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Specifications

The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar 20TB hard drive is, unsurprisingly, not a drive that is built like the rest. Aside from the hefty task of storing 20TB of data, this is a drive that is designed for deployment in much more industrial arrays, in near limitless storage pools (rackmount, bolted onto rackmount, etc, etc) and will be in operation 24×7, with regular access and a higher % of data recycling as data moves between hot>warm>cold storage systems. This combined with the need for the drive to maintain a sustainable performance (not just hit a high peak transfer rate, but be able to maintain it without over-saturation over long, long periods of time. Then there is the expectations of lifespan on a HDD like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB, with the industry standard of 5 years really being a great deal more significantly when it comes to data center hardware.

Therefore, the hardware specifications of the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are similar to those found in the WD Red Pro 20TB drive released around the same time, however, there is a greater focus on annual workloads, durability and lifespan of the drive when in constant use. With most regular/normal server class drives arriving with a 180TB write workload per year, Pro series drive support upto 300TB and Western Digital DC HC560 series a whopping 550TB annually – hence the much longer MTBF hour rating of 2.5 million. This combined with fixed 7200RPM and massive 512MB cache means that this is a drive that will run faster, even under sustained high use and do so in significantly larger RAID configurations. This does also result in a higher power consumption in use, standby or idle modes, as well as a larger general vibration when in use and a higher noise level when the drive is in operation (which climbs even higher during larger frequency but low size/volume access periods – ie those larger IOPS measurement based operations). Then there is the inclusion of OptiNAND from WD on these larger 18TB and 20TB HDDs, which we will touch on in a moment. Before then though, here are the full specifications of the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB HDD:

What is OptiNAND and Why is it so Important?

Of course, users who have been following the developments of WD in their roadmaps and reveals of larger-scale drive media will be aware that the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB also features a new technological design being rolled out in these bigger drives to merge existing storage technologies into something even better – OptiNAND. This is a new approach to an old idea that never really took off, where the benefits of small areas of faster NAND storage (more typically associated with SSD media) and affords a small area of NAND to a larger scale hard drive to be used for metadata and for storing data in the event of power failure. Flash is also interesting from a persistence standpoint. DRAM gets flushed on power loss, but NAND is non-volatile and can continue to keep metadata information without having to re-hydrate after a boot sequence, be removed from the system for some reason, or any other event where power drops. The WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB hard drive (much like other Western Digital 20TB drives currently) arrives with a portion of 64-layer/64GB BICS3 (3D TLC)

WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.

The slice of iNAND has its own dedicated controller, much like an SSD. While metadata management itself doesn’t help to increase platter density, it enables a range of benefits that do. As one can imagine, the higher the density of the HDD, the more metadata it generates. Moving metadata to a fast, dense and scalable storage area gives more freedom for manufacturers to create higher capacity drives.

OptiNAND	DRAM

But why choose NAND over DRAM? Western Digital explained back in August 2021 that modern high-density HDDs generate gigabytes of metadata and it’s too costly to include sufficient  DRAM to hold it. In addition, moving metadata to their own dedicated area will free up more space on the platters themselves to store user data. There’s more to it than capacity increases, though; using OptiNAND also helps with reliability, specifically with the repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI).

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Design

The design of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB and 18TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever.

The top of the DC HC560 has the usual branded logos, technical details, firmware identification and date of production. The 20TB entries into the highly industry-favoured WD Ultrastar DC media range have arrived remarkably quickly with this drive being produced less than two months before the writing of this review. For a while, WD was noticeably slower on rolling out larger capacities since the 12TB and 14TB drive era, but in the last couple of storage tiers they have caught up considerably with their release frequency.

The sides of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any SAN/NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 269MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Ultrastar HC560) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens. It is also worth highlighting that (much like the rest of the Ultrastar range) the DC 560 20TB is available in SAS too, as well as arriving in a few different encryption standards inside (SED – self-encrypted drive) for industries that need secure read/write and secure erasure as standard).

The bulk of that area is occupied by those nine platters that are being read by a triple-stage actuator (an advancement on the standard arm that engages with the platters to retrieve data). This TSA means that errors and performance issues that can be associated with disks built on denser drive platters are hugely negated. Whether you are looking at NAS drives, SAN/Data-Center drives or even regular single deployment domestic hard drives, the bigger the drive in capacity, the more susceptible a drive can be to even the smallest vibration or shock passing through it from the host system. How does the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB counter this?

The 0F38755 20TB (much like the rest of the WD Gold and WD Ultrastar DC ranges in the larger capacities) hugely benefits from the multi-axis shocker sensor and 3D active balance plus in the framework and firmware of the HDD, which means the drive’s heads and platters have their generated vibration and ambient shock/vibration from the larger 24×7 server RAID configuration monitored and the drive proactively balances its performance. In short, this means that the drive can be more dynamic internally as surrounding system stress changes. Overall, what you have here is a very, VERY sturdy HDD. So, let’s see how that build quality translates into performance.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Testing

Testing the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in data center server environments of 12-24-36-48bays and higher. So, although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate frequencies of up to 12 bays of drives, I do not have multiple WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP.

• Windows 10 Pro Desktop System
• Intel i5 11400 Rocket Lake – 6-Core 2.6/4.4Ghz
• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory
• Intel B560M mATX Motherboard
• OS Storage, Seagate Firecuda 120 SSD
• Test Hard Drive connected to a Sabrent USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s external dock
• Synology test was conducted on a DS920+ NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool (selected so we can isolate the sound level)
• QNAP test was conducted on a TS-464 NAS using the system’s own benchmarking tool (once again, to isolate the Ultrastar DC HC560 Noise level from the larger NAS system)

These last tests are important as not only is the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later.

The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB and 256MB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 4K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB fileover a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines.

Next, I performed a quick test on CrystalDiskMark using a 64MB and 512MB test file, as well as mixed 70/30% R/W. The results were consistent and lived upto WD’s claims here.

The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 256MB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score. It is also worth highlighting that the 4K Random IOPS tests hugely demonstrated the noise level that this system can hit – which we will touch on later.

Finally, I conducted a straightforward transfer onto the HDD using Windows File Explorer. This was done with a folder filled with a little over 20GB of mixed file types and volumes (2,250 files across 71 folders). This transfer took a fraction under 2 mins:

Synology & QNAP NAS Testing with the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive

Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 16TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 18TB and 20TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.

If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some.

Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

The HDD compatibility of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard drive on the QNAP NAS platform is less complicated (eg the 18TB HDDs from most brands are listed) but at the time of writing the 20TB models are still not on the available list of compatible HDDs (again, this will likely be addressed shortly after commercial launch). Here is how the drive is benchmarked and appeared in the QNAP NAS system.

Noise Testing the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB NAS Hard Drive

Another factor that is all too often overlooked is the noise that is generated by pro and enterprise-class hard drives. Because these larger capacity and more durable drives are built to provide as high a performance as possible, as well as survive the rigours of more industrial deployment, they end up being noticeably noisier in use. Now, in larger rackmount installations, the noise of the NAS system fans and operation will easily drown out the noise of HDDs. However, these things are much, much different in smaller-scale deployment. Now that most HDD brands have shifted their portfolios to only include 14/16TB media and higher to only exist in their Pro/Enterprise class tiers, those buying more modest NAS systems in the 1-8-Bay scale will be much more likely to hear the noise of these more enduring HDDs. The WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB is not an especially quiet drive when in operation and it has been designed with SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER server systems in mind. Therefore, even in idle, it makes a fair amount of noise when in operation. Here is how the drive sounds when the drive is powered on and on idle/standby (i.e no active file processes):

WD 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – IDLE (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

And here is how the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters):

WD 20TB Noise in a Synology DS920+ NAS – HEAVY ACCESS (click below – you may need to grant permission/access in the browser)

Once again, if you are deploying this in a larger than 8-Bay NAS system (especially rackmount, but desktop too), then the clicks, hums and whirs of the WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB will not be especially noticeable above the general active fan noise of the host NAS system. But in smaller deployments and especially in setups where you will be in closer proximity with the NAS, this HDD will be especially noticeable and larger RAID NAS arrays will exacerbate the noise.

WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB Hard Drive Review – Conclusion

The Western Digital DC HC560 does exactly what it sets out to achieve. This is an incredibly robust hard drive that you can tell WD has poured alot of that enterprise audience R&D into! The fact that it is 20TB is always going to be impressive, but the real draw here is that this high degree of storage capacity has been achieved, without SMR and without compromising it’s performance and use in a larger RAID environment. HDDs are still in popular industry use and until the ongoing demand for Large Affordable Capacity AND fast access continues, you can see why most popular hard drive brands are predicted to comfortably hit 50TB by the end of the decade. The Western Digital DC HC560 20TB hard disk is a great piece of engineering that continues to support the continued popularity of the Ultrastar series for large-scale data center use. However, it is REALLY important to understand WHY this drive is DC/Data-Center classed and not appropriate for the average home user looking to get big capacity in a single drive. For a start, the Western Digital DC HC560 is a noisy drive! Alongside a higher power consumption to keep this industrial drive running 24×7, it is a drive designed for exceptional fast power on/spin up, as well as having a nine spinning platters to dance between all the time, so it makes alot of humming, spinning, vibrating and clicking noises throughout it’s operations – in a data center, fulling populating a 24 bay rackmount, you won’t hear it. But in a modest home 2-4-Bay system, it sounds horrendous! Enterprise drives like the Western Digital DC HC560 20TB are designed for larger scale deployment and used in bulk (RAID configs), hence the lower price often when compared again NAS PRO drives like WD Red Pro. The Western Digital DC HC560 Ultrastar is an exceptional Hyper-Scale storage hard drive, just don’t try to use it outside of those environments!

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