Western Digital has begun selling 20TB hard drives with OptiNAND technology
At the beginning of this month, Western Digital CEO David Goeckler stated that it will start mass shipments of 20TB hard drives using OptiNAND technology in November. According to the introduction of Western Digital during the HDD Reimagine event, the special feature of the OptiNAND architecture is that the iNAND Embedded Universal Flash Drive (EFD) is integrated into the PCB, through a series of technical combinations, it can effectively increase the capacity of the hard disk, improve the performance and reliability, and it is an innovative architecture.
Recently, Western Digital has begun to sell 20TB hard drives using OptiNAND technology, which belongs to the WD Gold series. Currently, it only provides a SATA 6Gbps interface at a price of US$679.99 and a five-year warranty. Compared with the $571.99 of the WD Gold series 18TB hard drive, the price is much more expensive. The OptiNAND architecture should provide better performance. At the same time, users who purchase this type of hard drive are more concerned about the cost of the entire life cycle, not just the price of a single product.
Both WD Gold series 20TB and Ultrastar DC HC650 20TB adopt energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology. The speed is 7200 RPM, the single-disc capacity is 2.2TB, there are 9 discs in total, and the three-stage drive is used to improve the positioning accuracy of the head on the track. As for data centers and enterprise-level NAS, this type of hard drive will have some enhancements to reduce the impact of vibration and improve reliability and service life.
It is understood that the WD Gold series 20TB has a continuous transmission speed of 269 MB/s, an average delay of 4.16 milliseconds, running power consumption of 7W, an idle mode of 6W, a rated workload of 550TB/year, and an annual failure rate of 0.35%.
