American hardware maker Western Digital has unveiled the world’s first 22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR hard disk drives (HDDs). These industry first HDDs are meant for data centers and are currently being tested by select hyper-scale cloud customers.
Western Digital’s new hard drives use the company’s OptiNAND technology to unlock higher levels of capacity, performance, and data resiliency. Using this technology, the new 22TB CMR HDD is able to deliver areal density on a 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform with ten disks.
This will allow cloud computing providers to store more data in less space, which will ultimately bring down the cost of cloud storage services.
OptiNAND technology combined with the company’s proprietary firmware for hardware enhancements, the new HDDs’ UltraSMR tech brings large block encoding with an advanced error correction algorithm that increases track-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity HDDs.
The 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD is the first to use this technology. It features 2.6TB per platter and offers 18% more storage capacity than before.
The 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD will start shipping to data center customers soon while the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD will only roll out to select customers in the summer.
