Western Digital Announces 22TB and 26TB HDDs

These enhancements allow our customers to get serious gains including:

-Smaller form factor for their storage device.

-Lower electricity cost with minimal hard drives and keeping that watt cost per terabyte much lower than ever before, (this can be a big savings to a data center).

-Less monitoring many drives.

-Reduction of heat / cooling needs.

 At the time of this article our largest capacity available is a 20 TB, which still packs a serious punch too!

HHD (Hard drive disks) is still the go to for many storage applications vs. the SSD (solid-state disk) reasons include, cost per GB, storage capacities, life expectancy, limited performance.

Create your own private cloud!

 We have come a long way and  photo below for remembrance (taken at the time of this article with a working drive)

PrimeArray Fun fact!

How many of these (caviar 2340) 341MB drives would it take to equal a 26 TB drive??? We have come a long way photo below for remembrance (taken at the time of this article with a working drive)

PrimeArray Fun fact!

How many of these (Caviar 2340) 341MB drives would it take to equal a 26 TB drive???

Approximately 80,000!

I’m sure you can imagine the power savings, heat reduction, equipment requirement reduction from that math. 80K hard drives capacity in one the exact same size.

Technical specifications of the hard drives being introduced;

WD is doubling down on energy-assisted PMR (ePMR) technology and OptiNAND (introduced first in the 20TB CMR drives). It goes without saying that the new high-capacity drives are helium-filled (HelioSeal technology). The main change common to both drives is the shift to a 10-stack design.

The SMR drives are getting an added capacity boost, thanks to WD's new UltraSMR technology. This involves adoption of a new advanced error correction algorithm to go along with encoding of larger blocks. This allows improvement in the tracks-per-inch (TPI) metric, resulting in 2.6TB per platter. The new Ultrastar DC HC670 uses ten platters to provide 26TB of host-managed SMR storage for cloud service providers

The 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 and 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 are currently sampling to hyperscalers. Volume shipment of the CMR drive to the channel is set for the next quarter. The Ultrastar HC HC670 is a host-managed SMR drive, and will hence ship only to select customers around the same timeframe. Western Digital will be delivering variants of the CMR drive across its HDD portfolio - 22TB WD Purple Pro for surveillance NVRs, WD Red Pro for NAS systems, and WD Gold for SMB and enterprise customers in summer.

The updated capacity points - in particular, the jump in the SMR drive capacity - delivers clear TCO benefits to WD's cloud customers. Crucially, WD believes it has enough trust in its ePMR setup to deliver 30TB+ HDDs without having to go the HAMR route.

Western Digital has announced that it is sampling its new industry-leading 22TB¹ and 26TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers, further expanding its areal density leadership and delivering customer value by driving TCO lower.

Western Digital’s HDD technology portfolio and areal density leadership puts it at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies, Western Digital is on a clear path to delivering 30+ TB with ePMR

OptiNAND, UltraSMR and ePMR Drive Cloud TCO Lower

The new ePMR drives leverage Western Digital’s OptiNAND technology to unlock unprecedented levels of capacity, performance and data resiliency. The 22TB CMR HDD incorporates OptiNAND to deliver areal-density leadership on a mature 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform with ten disks.

Combining OptiNAND with proprietary firmware that leverages HDD system-level hardware advancements, Western Digital’s new UltraSMR technology introduces large block encoding along with an advanced error correction algorithm that increases tracks-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity. The result is Western Digital’s new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD that delivers 2.6TB per platter, offering 18% more capacity for cloud customers optimizing their stacks to take advantage of the benefits of SMR. With cloud service providers increasingly adding SMR to their datacenter roadmaps, the 26TB capacity serves as a tipping point to accelerate adoption.

Uniquely capable with OptiNAND, the HDDs also include the ArmorCache write cache data safety feature, which gives customers the performance of write cache enable (WCE) combined with the data protection of write cache disable (WCD) for added data protection or resiliency in case of an emergency power off (EPO). For the first time in HDD history, this Write Cache Data Safety feature gives users both performance and data protection, no matter which mode is selected. OptiNAND gives the drives a significant performance increase also in WCD mode, which is greatest in random writes with larger block transfers. At common HDD application transfer lengths of 256KB or greater, IOPS and throughput improve by more than 40% relative to a non-OptiNAND drives, with a peak improvement of over 80% at 1MB transfer length.

 In shot coming up with new 22 TB and 26 TB+ Hard drive will allow our customers to have tremendous benefits and their systems, which will reduce the number of Hard drive to be used in your NAS and there by reduces the power consumption, heat, size form monitoring needs etc.