Western Digital Targets Cloud Market With 22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR HDDs

What’s Next Western Digital Event kicked off today with the keynote announcement it will be sampling new industry-leading 22TB and 26TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers to lower TCO. Western Digital’s technology portfolio and areal density put it at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal, and now UltraSMR technologies, Western Digital is on track to deliver 30+ TB with ePMR.

What’s Next Western Digital Event kicked off today with the keynote announcement it will be sampling new industry-leading 22TB and 26TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers to lower TCO. Western Digital’s technology portfolio and areal density put it at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal, and now UltraSMR technologies, Western Digital is on track to deliver 30+ TB with ePMR.

OptiNAND, UltraSMR, and ePMR Drive Cloud TCO Lower

The new ePMR drives leverage Western Digital’s OptiNAND technology to increase capacity and improve performance and data resiliency. The 22TB CMR (conventional magnetic recording) HDD incorporates OptiNAND to deliver areal-density on a ten disk 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform.

Combining OptiNAND with proprietary firmware that leverages HDD system-level hardware advancements, the new UltraSMR technology introduces large block encoding and an advanced error correction algorithm that increases tracks-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity. The new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD delivers 2.6TB per platter, offering 18% more capacity. With the growing number of cloud service providers adding Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to their data center roadmaps, the 26TB capacity serves as a tipping point to accelerate adoption.

With OptiNAND, the HDDs also include the ArmorCache write cache data safety feature, giving 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 emergency power off (EPO).

To achieve optimal performance, hard disk drives (HDDs) are designed to cache write data in DRAM before recording the data to the physical media. Once data is stored in DRAM, a write complete signal can be sent back to the host to accept the next command. After caching data in DRAM, the drive can then stage writes and reorder when necessary, optimizing the drive’s write performance. However, DRAM is volatile, and its contents are lost when power is unexpectedly shut off, so data in DRAM which has not yet been written to the media is lost. Because of this, HDDs have long had the option to enable or disable this write cache.

With the ArmorCache feature, enabled by OptiNAND technology, this choice is no longer necessary. When operating in WCE mode, drives can ensure that the DRAM cache will be safely written upon loss of power and no data is lost. When operating in WCD mode, a larger cache size guarantees more data will be safely written upon power loss, and the drive operates with WCE-equivalent performance. Whichever the system chooses, ArmorCache technology combines the performance of WCE mode with the data protection of WCD mode, offering the user the best of both worlds.

For the first time in HDD history, this Write Cache Data Safety feature gives users performance and data protection, no matter which mode is selected. OptiNAND gives the drives a significant performance increase in WCD mode, which is greatest in random writes with larger block transfers. For typical HDD application transfer lengths of 256KB or greater, IOPS and throughput improve by more than 40% relative to a non-OptiNAND drive, with a peak improvement of over 80% at 1MB transfer length.

22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR HDD Availability:

• The 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD and the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD are now sampling to select hyperscale customers. The DC HC570 HDD will begin volume shipments to the channel, and the UltraSMR HDD will start shipping to select customers in the summer of 2022.
• This summer, the Ultrastar Data60, and Data102 JBODs will feature the new 22TB CMR Ultrastar HDDs, delivering the industry’s highest storage density in a fully optimized platform for added durability and data reliability software-defined storage.
• Extending OptiNAND innovations across its HDD portfolio, Western Digital 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.

WD Gold 22TB Review

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