WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB SATA Hard Drive Review

WD Ultrastar DC HC510 Temperatures

Temperatures are important to ensure drives continue to run well over time, and especially in denser drive configurations. We wanted to give some sense of how hot drives run in our new testing suite.

Overall the HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB drive runs cool and at the middle of the pack when running benchmarks. The difference between idle and Max temperatures is small at a 1C difference.

Final Words

Overall, the WD Ultrastar DC HC510 10TB drives performed very well for us. Western Digital purchased HGST back in 2012 and later Western Digital phased out the HGST brand in 2018. As a result, the Ultrastar brand is now a WD brand rather than a HGST brand. For many years, the Ultrastar brand has served as the line for enterprise-class storage. During these years, what was once the capacity domain of Dell EMC and NetApp storage arrays has migrated to the edge NAS capacity point. We found the WD Ultrastar DC HC510 performed well in NAS boxes like the QNAP TVS-951X which we use as our new test bed.

We also wanted to comment on drive noise in operation, in our testing we found the drive made very little noise. We have seen many comment on the 8TB drives making a bit of noise while in a NAS, we did not notice this with the 10TB drives. Part of that is that newer helium-filled drives tend to run quieter and that transition started to happen with vigor in the 10TB capacity range.

For those looking for in-server storage, especially if your server comes with a SAS3 controller like a Dell EMC PERC card or a HPE SmartArray devices, we suggest looking at the SAS3 versions of this drive. If you want to use onboard SATA in a server platform or are looking to fill a SMB/ SOHO NAS, then the SATA Ultrastar DC HC510 is what you want.

At the time of this writing, the 10TB drives are not the highest-capacity, but they are on a great place in the price/ capacity curve making them a relatively good value.