Western Digital has announced the world’s first 22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR hard disk drives, which it claims are the first of their kind (HDDs). A restricted group of hyper-scale cloud clients is testing these industry-first HDDs in their data centers at this time.
They leverage Western Digital’s OptiNAND technology to unleash more storage space, performance, and data resilience in modern hard drives. For example, the new 22TB CMR HDD can provide areal density on a 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform with ten disks using this technology, and it’s available now.
When more data is stored in a smaller amount of space, the cost of cloud storage services will be reduced.
High-capacity HDDs may now be possible by combining OptiNAND with proprietary firmware for hardware improvements and UltraSMR technology, which uses big blocks of data encoded with a sophisticated error correction algorithm to increase the number of tracks per inch (TPI).
This technology is being used in a hard drive for the first time. It has an 18% increase in storage capacity over the previous model’s 2.6TB per platter.
22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDDs are already being shipped, whereas 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDDs will only be available to a small number of data centers in the summer.