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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 janrinok on Thursday May 12 2022, @12:39PM (1 child)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 12 2022, @12:39PM (#1244361) Journal
    I recall mag tapes from many years ago when working on mainframes. Slightly off topic - but is there a system that is cost effective for home use that you are aware of? The last time I searched, the mag tapes and equipment cost more than all of my other hardware put together!
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Thursday May 12 2022, @06:09PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Thursday May 12 2022, @06:09PM (#1244479)

    ebay, sometimes craigslist, etc. Look for LTO. Business depreciates perfectly good equipment. Sadly too often ends up scrapped or in landfill, but some smart people sell it.

    Often listers don't know what they have, and just list the drive by model number, rather than "LTO" "drive" "320 GB", or whatever the native capacity is. So some research might be needed, but that's easy, and you might get a better bargain in those cases (I have). Dell sells a lot of drives, but someone else made them of course.

    You're probably aware, but in case you're not: be aware that tapes and drives are often labeled / advertised for their compressed capacity. You don't have to use drive's compression- I never trust it. Look for native capacity, which is usually considered 1/2 of the compressed capacity.

    I had a longer post going but no time to finish it. But consider there are cheap small tape libraries available too. I have one that holds, iirc, 8 DAT tapes. Another that holds iirc 7 8 mm tapes (yes, like the 8 mm video tape, but qualified for data). So you can get a lot of backup capacity with lots of cheap tapes and not have to manually change tapes as often (if your backup spans many tapes).