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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 11 2022, @10:19AM   Printer-friendly

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday May 12 2022, @06:25AM (3 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday May 12 2022, @06:25AM (#1244311) Homepage

    I am serious. I too will take reliability over conveniently compact, and that "crap, lost the big disk" problem is precisely why I don't mind a stack of 3TB drives instead of one 26TB drive.

    Of course, I'm not a datacenter that needs all 26TB online all the time, either.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday May 12 2022, @06:21PM (2 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday May 12 2022, @06:21PM (#1244480)

    Datacenters RAID them together, and you can "cluster" RAIDS together, and "storage area network", etc., so individual drive size isn't important for total capacity. But then they divvy them up into virtualized machines anyway!

    They care more about capacity per hectare. :)

    "Hectare" was partially silly, partially serious, of course.

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday May 12 2022, @07:22PM

      by Reziac (2489) on Thursday May 12 2022, @07:22PM (#1244509) Homepage

      Ha. Hectare may be a joke today, but you just wait!

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13 2022, @07:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13 2022, @07:31AM (#1244690)

      We also care about reliability and service uptime. The problem with overly-large drives is that the array takes forever to rebuild. Unless you are using enough redundancies or replicas, you will have a failure on rebuild and some data will be lost. Bigger disks can reduce your overall cost, but it depends on the specs and your fault probability projections, especially the URE. Running degraded for long periods of time or handling large amounts of data increase the probability of loss. That said, we are considering adding more of the latest generations of large drives. But we are only doing so while maintaining proper diversity to prevent complete failure.