Western Digital (WD) has announced that it is sampling its new industry-leading 22TB CMR (conventional magnetic recording) and 26TB UltraSMR (shingled magnetic recording) HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers, further expanding its areal density leadership and delivering customer value by driving TCO lower.
► Reduces cloud TCO and accelerates adoption of SMR
► Trials taking place with hyperscale cloud customers
Making use of its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies, WD is on a clear path to delivering 30+ TB with ePMR.
The new ePMR drives leverage WD’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, WD’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 WD's new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD that delivers 2.6TB per platter, offering 18% more capacity for cloud customers optimising their stacks to take advantage of the benefits of SMR. With cloud service providers increasingly adding SMR to their data centre 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. See the tech brief here for more details.
The 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD and the new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD are now sampling to hyperscale customers. The DC HC570 HDD will begin volume shipments to the channel, and the UltraSMR HDD will begin shipping to select customers in the summer of 2022. The Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs will feature the new 22TB CMR Ultrastar HDDs this summer, delivering the industry's highest storage density in a fully optimized platform for added durability and data reliability for software-defined storage.
Extending OptiNAND innovations across its HDD portfolio, WD will deliver 22TB WD Purple Pro HDDs for smart video/surveillance, WD Red Pro HDDs for NAS solutions, and WD Gold HDDs for system integrators and resellers serving enterprises and SMBs. These drives will be available this summer.
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