Western Digital Preps 28 TB UltraSMR Laborious Drive
Western Digital is gearing as much as begin sampling of its 28 TB nearline arduous drive for hyperscalers. The brand new HDD will use the corporate’s energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) expertise with UltraSMR monitor layouts. Since each applied sciences are actually acquainted to hyperscalers, the validation and qualification of this tough drive ought to be comparatively simple.
“We’re about to start product sampling of our 28 TB UltraSMR drive,” mentioned David Goeckeler, chief government of Western Digital, on the firm’s most up-to-date earnings name. “This cutting-edge product is constructed upon the success of our ePMR and UltraSMR applied sciences with options and reliability trusted by our prospects worldwide. We’re staging this product for fast qualification and ramp as demand improves.”
Proper now, Western Digital is transport its 26 TB UltraSMR arduous drives launched over a yr in the past to pick prospects amongst operators of huge cloud datacenters. Since these drives depend on UltraSMR it took hyperscalers fairly some time to qualify them earlier than deployment. However now that Western Digital’s prospects know the way to use UltraSMR and what to anticipate from it when it comes to efficiency and habits, deployment of 28 TB HDDs will possible go smoother.
Based mostly on their launch timeline, Western Digital’s 28 TB arduous drives are anticipated to compete towards Seagate’s 32 TB HDDs based mostly on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) expertise beginning early 2024. Western Digital providing shall be acquainted to its purchasers who already use shingled magnetic recording HDDs usually and UltraSMR drives specifically. In the meantime, Seagate’s product will ship increased capability, predictable efficiency (and significantly increased efficiency in relation to write operations), however will in all probability want barely longer qualification.
Western Digital’s UltraSMR set of applied sciences guarantees so as to add round 20% of additional capability to CMR (standard magnetic recording) platters. To make UltraSMR potential, Western Digital not solely needed to enhance the quantity variety of shingled bands and cut back the variety of CMR bands, however make use of all of its modern HDD applied sciences. This contains triple stage actuators with two-dimensional (TDMR) learn heads, ePMR write heads, OptiNAND expertise, Distributed Sector (DSEC) expertise and a proprietary error correcting code (ECC) expertise with massive block encoding to make sure that elevated adjoining tracks interference (ATI) doesn’t hurt knowledge integrity. In truth, the subtle ECC functionality supported by an HDD controller could also be essential SMR arduous drives within the coming years in addition to for CMR drives within the longer-term future.
One fascinating factor about Western Digital’s 28 TB HDD is that it’ll possible use the corporate’s 2nd era ePMR since it’s based mostly on a 24 TB CMR drive and the latter is supposed to depend on the ePMR 2 technology with superior head buildings, in line with Western Digital’s roadmap.
