Western Digital will launch a 20TB hard drive using OptiNAND technology

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In November last year, Seagate began to provide data centers with 20TB hard drives using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. In addition, Seagate is developing a variety of consumer hard drives with a capacity of 20TB, which will use the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies. It is expected that hard drives using SMR/PMR+Mach.2 technology will be available in the second half of this year, and will have higher cost performance.

As a competitor of Seagate, Western Digital is developing new technologies on HDD. According to Anandtech, during the recent HDD Reimagine event, Western Digital introduced the latest OptiNAND architecture. The special feature is the iNAND embedded universal flash drive integrated on the PCB. Western Digital said that the OptiNAND architecture is different from the past hybrid architecture hard disk (SSHD), and it is an innovative architecture. Unlike SSHD, the flash memory in the OptiNAND architecture is not used as a cache. It does not store user data during normal operation but instead stores metadata for hard disk operations. Through a series of technology combinations, it can effectively increase the hard disk capacity, improve performance and reliability.

This 20TB hard drive is based on the OptiNAND+ePMR solution and consists of 9 discs with a single disc capacity of 2.2TB, a three-level drive is used to improve the positioning accuracy of the head on the track, and a flash drive equipped with 3D TLC NAND is used, and controlled by a customized main control chip. Western Digital plans to introduce the OptiNAND architecture to all hard drives of 20TB or above, and eventually increase the capacity to 50TB.

Western Digital did not provide specific read and write data for the time being but emphasized that the addition of iNAND embedded general-purpose flash drives can improve the performance of hard disk burst random read and write. Western Digital said that the 20TB hard drive based on the OptiNAND+ePMR solution will be delivered as soon as the end of the year. Obviously, the first batch of customers is from the data center.

Source: Western Digital

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