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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 11 2022, @04:46PM (2 children)
They should just separate them out into two partitions then. One partition is non-shingled for whatever non-shingled tasks you want (ie: operating system, cache, etc...). Another one is shingled for data storage.
Really, there should be multiple partitions. SSD hybrid drives should just be dual partition. One for SSD and the other one for HHD. Let the operating system decide what goes where upon installation and during usage. The OS could automatically assign tasks that need those faster response times to the SSD while assigning unused tasks to the HHD.
The hard drives should probably be layered. One SSD partition for the OS and frequently used apps that require fast response times (but don't get modified often), one CMR partition for cache and less used apps and frequently used data files that require intermediate response times and get modified often, and one SMR partition for large data files that require slow response times, get accessed infrequently, and that don't get modified that often.
Or, one SSD hard drive for operating system files and high priority apps
One two partition CMR/HDR drive, the CMR section can be used for cache and frequently modified apps that require intermediate response times. The SMR partition can be used for long term storage of larger files.
Two hard drives is better as you can get faster overall speeds (two hard drives can offer more bandwidth to the motherboard/processor than one and you can have more concurrent seeks and reads/writes). Plus you can still retrieve your data if the SSD crashes.
Kinda like how the brain organizes information? You have information that you haven't used in a long time stored somewhere in the 'back' of your brain while more frequently accessed information is more readily accessible in the 'front'.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 11 2022, @04:58PM
As I mention above, there are host-managed drives, so what you're saying is already possible. :) In theory / on paper anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2022, @01:10AM
On Linux, you can already use zonefs. One of its layered operating modes is almost identical to what you describe in the early part of your comment. Otherwise, using a zone-aware file system like F2FS is almost identical to the latter part of your comment.