Western Digital Announces 22TB CMR and 26TB SMR HDDs: 10 Platters plus ePMR
Western Digital is announcing the sampling of its new 22TB CMR and 26TB SMR hard drives today at its What's Next Western Digital Event. As usual, the hyperscale cloud customers will get first dibs on these drives. The key takeaway from today's presentation is that Western Digital doesn't yet feel the need to bring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) into the picture. In fact, WD is doubling down on energy-assisted PMR (ePMR) technology and OptiNAND (introduced first in the 20TB CMR drives). WD is also continuing to use the triple-stage actuator that it started shipping in the first half of 2020 in the new drives. It goes without saying that the new high-capacity drives are helium-filled (HelioSeal technology). The main change common to both drives is the shift to a 10-stack design.
The SMR drives are getting an added capacity boost, thanks to WD's new UltraSMR technology. This involves adoption of a new advanced error correction algorithm to go along with encoding of larger blocks. This allows improvement in the tracks-per-inch (TPI) metric, resulting in 2.6TB per platter. The new Ultrastar DC HC670 uses ten platters to provide 26TB of host-managed SMR storage for cloud service providers.
PMR = Perpendicular Magnetic Recording
SMR = Shingled Magnetic Recording
OptiNAND = embedded flash drive included on the HDD for caching metadata
While the company did not quantify the amount of NAND in its OptiNAND drives, they are stressing the fact that it is not a hybrid drive (SSHD). Unlike SSHDs, the OptiNAND drives do not store any user data at all during normal operation. Instead, the NAND is being used to store metadata from HDD operation in order to improve capacity, performance, and reliability.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 11 2022, @10:36AM (9 children)
Or is it yet another "who cares, you already bought it" [techspot.com] case?
Let's face it, huge HDs are often used for backup storage. In other words, in applications where huge amounts of data are being written at once. And now guess what SRM drives are completely useless at because their write speed is abysmal if huge amounts of data have to be written at once.
Adding more cache only tries to mask that problem. All it does is to make it look awesome in benchmarks because benchmarks usually only write a couple gigs, at most, which is something the caching architecture can easily catch and compensate. As soon as the cache actually has to drain to the slowpoke SMR drive, things get ugly.
(Score: 5, Funny) by EvilSS on Wednesday May 11 2022, @01:44PM (1 child)
Yes, all of the SMR drives will have a large 'WD' printed on the drive label.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Thursday May 12 2022, @02:51AM
Such marketing bias! I'll have you know some have "Seagate" printed on the label!
https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/ [seagate.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @02:48PM (3 children)
They should be labeled. Transparency is important. Consumers should know what they are buying.
Unfortunately companies don't even think the consumer owns what they buy. They shouldn't even be informed about what they are buying to begin with. They have to buy it and learn the drawbacks after it's too late to return it for a refund.
If you buy something and the company later decides to remotely brick it (ie: stop supporting it) then the consumer is just out of luck. You're not even allowed to repair what you paid for because it's not yours. You simply bought a limited license for a limited time for it to go into a landfill in short order.
This isn't free market capitalism. Free market capitalism assumes full transparency. It's the government's job to enforce transparency in a capitalistic society. This is not a capitalistic government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @03:15PM (1 child)
I think the WD Red plus are now the CMR drives whereas the WD red are now the SMR drives?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @03:17PM
(I guess what's annoying is that USB hard drives are not labeled? Just the internal ones).
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 11 2022, @07:23PM
Free market capitalism assumes a fully informed demand side. A demand side that knows everything they need to know to make an informed decision about the goods and services that they want to buy.
That's the fundamental problem of the system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @03:41PM (2 children)
This isn't correct. SMR (not SRM) drives only have problems with large amounts of random writes.
If you write terabytes onto a SMR drive, front to back, as you would for making a backup (or any other kind of bulk storage, you don't have to write all at once, it's not a DVD) , it will perform just fine.
Just because they have high profile situations where they aren't suitable doesn't mean they don't have plenty of situations that they are suitable. Bulk storage is probably the best case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @03:47PM
That's fine but I think what most people are complaining about is the lack of disclosure.
For example, USB hard drives don't seem to disclose this type of information.
Consumers have a right to know what we are buying. Our products should belong to us, no the corporations that sold them to us, and we should be informed about what we are buying.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 11 2022, @07:25PM
So much for the theory. Ever had to write backups to a HD that has been used and reused over and over, especially with incremental backups? First write will be fine, consecutive writes have more of a random write than a bulk write.