Empowering the world's most essential data infrastructures, Western Digital Corp. today announced that Dropbox Inc., a leading global collaboration platform, is one of the first to qualify the Ultrastar DC HC650 20 TB, host-managed, shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drives (HDD). With Western Digital SMR HDDs serving as the storage foundation for its custom-built, multi-exabyte storage platforms, Dropbox 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.

"We've been working with Western Digital for many years, and throughout several phases of our storage platform development," said Andrew Fong, vice president of engineering, Dropbox. "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 20 TB SMR hard drives to further our cost savings and to provide our customers with even more value. Western Digital is an important strategic partner and we look forward to continuously pushing cloud infrastructure boundaries together."