Mechanical hard drives opened a new chapter today. Western Digital released the world's first 26TB capacity hard drive , ultrastar DC HC670.
While the total capacity is at a new high, the single disc capacity has reached a record 2.6TB, so only 10 discs are needed to achieve a total capacity of 26TB.
The drive uses several of Western Digital's proprietary technologies, including OptiNAND, ePMR, TSA, HelioSeal, and UltraSMR.
OptiNAND technology has previously been used in WD Gold 20TB, Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB two hard disk drives (CMR), the base UFS specification of iNAND flash memory chip, but not as a cache, but to store metadata, reduce the adjacent track interference refresh time, can improve the disk storage density, read and write performance.
ePMR is energy-assisted vertical magnetic recording, TSA is a third-order orbit-finding positioning system, and HelioSeal is naturally helium-filled packaging technology.
SMR tile magnetic recording has been almost universally recorded, but it is really helpful for increasing capacity, and Western Digital has also created an upgraded version of UltraSMR, which supports larger block coding and more advanced error correction technology, thereby increasing the width size (TPI) of each track, which in turn increases capacity.
In addition, for the first time, the new drive introduces ArmorCache write cache protection technology, which improves performance (WCE) when turned on and data security (WCE) when turned off.
In addition, Western Digital also released the world's first CMR traditional magnetic record of 22TB hard disk "Ultrastar DC HC570", the same 10 discs, single disc capacity of 2.2TB, also has OptiNAND, ePMR, TSA, HelioSeal and other technologies.
The HC670 26TB and HC 570 22TB have already begun to send samples to some major data center customers and will be supplied in batches this summer.
WD also revealed that with new technologies, especially ePMR, it is steadily moving towards 30TB+ capacity.