In an sudden announcement throughout their quarterly earnings name this week, Western Digital revealed that it has begun sampling an upcoming 32TB exhausting drive. The nearline HDD is geared toward hyperscalers, and depends on a mix of Westen Digital’s EAMR expertise, in addition to shingled magnetic recording (SMR) expertise to hit their highest capability figures to this point.
Western Digital’s 32TB HDD makes use of the entire firm’s most superior applied sciences. Besides energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR/ePMR 2 to be extra exact) expertise, WD can be leveraging triple-stage actuators for higher positioning of heads and two-dimensional (TDMR) learn heads, OptiNAND for additional efficiency and reliability, distributed sector (DSEC) expertise and a proprietary error correcting code (ECC) expertise. And, most significantly, UltraSMR expertise to offer further capability.
“We are shipping samples of our 32TB UltraSMR/ePMR nearline hard drives to select customers,” stated David Goeckeler, chief government of Western Digital, on the earnings name. “These drives feature advanced triple-stage actuators and OptiNAND technology which are designed for seamless qualification, integration and deployment in hyperscale cloud and enterprise data centers while maintaining exceptional reliability.”
Seagate is at present transport its 30TB Exos HDDs primarily based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) platform known as Modaic 3+ to pick out exascalers, and the corporate has implied that it may possibly construct a 32TB model of the drive utilizing SMR. Therefore, from capability viewpoint, Western Digital’s announcement implies that the corporate has caught up with its rival.
As with the comapny’s different UltraSMR drives, the 32TB nearline drive is geared toward WD’s enterprise prospects, whose infrastructure can deal with the extra administration necessities that SMR imposes. As SMR in enterprise drives just isn’t clear, it is as much as the host to handle most of the complexities that include a tough drive that is not fitted to random writes. Though no less than in WD’s case, the upshot is that UltraSMR additionally provides a extra vital density enhance than different SMR implementations, utilizing a bigger variety of SMR bands to extend HDD capability by as much as 20%.
Working backwards, that 20% capability enhance additionally implies that WD’s new drive is ranging from 2.56TB CMR platters. And whereas 2.56TB makes for a really respectable areal density, this could imply that WD remains to be behind rival Seagate by way of areal density total, as Seagate has 3TB CMR platters in its newest HAMR-based Exos drives.
