Western Digital’s range of hard drives has been expanded with a new high-capacity model. The Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR is the first commercial 26TB drive to retain the traditional 3.5″ chassis.

The design of the new HDD contains 10 2.6 TB discs of any kind. The vendor’s impressive performance was achieved through the use of proprietary OptiNAND technology, which provides high performance for random write operations with large blocks. Combined with proprietary firmware, Western Digital’s new UltraSMR technology also provides large-block encoding with an advanced error correction algorithm.

This combination of parameters has increased the number of tracks per inch (TPI) to create a high-capacity hard drive. The drive is aimed primarily at the business sector and is already being tested by some WD cloud storage customers.

The start of sales of the Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR 26 TV hard drive will take place in the summer of 2022. A little later, the company will release a more affordable version of the drive for 22 TVs. The price of new products has not yet been announced.