Western Digital: Existing technology will push the capacity to 30TB, HAMR will be added
Western Digital disclosed some important details of their hard drive roadmap at the 5th Annual Virtual Wells Fargo TMT Summit Conference this week. Western Digitalremain optimistic about the demand for HDDs in the next few years and mentioned that with current technology Western Digital can provide hard drives with a capacity of up to 30TB in the next few years. Of course, it should eventually use the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, but they have no longer mentioned the microblog-assisted magnetic recording technology MARM that Western Digital had high hopes for.
According to a report by Tomshardware, Western Digital’s current largest HDD Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB and WD Gold 20TB use 9 2.2TB discs, and use energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording ePMR technology and OptiNAND architecture, WD Gold 20TB is integrated iNAND embedded universal flash drive on the PCB. Unlike SSHD, the flash memory in the OptiNAND architecture is not used as a cache but used to store data directly.
Image: Western Digital
Western Digital intends to add a 10th disc to the hard drive so that another 2.2TB of space can be added so that a 22TB hard drive can be launched in 2022. Western Digital also intends to extend the OptiNAND architecture to shingled magnetic recording SMR hard drives to provide some additional capacity for customers who optimize their software for SMR hard drives.
The ePMR+OptiNAND structure will create a hard disk with a capacity of 30TB in the future, which means that Western Digital will increase the storage density of a single disc by 36% in the next few years, and increase the number of discs to 10.
After reaching 30TB, HAMR technology is needed.
