Western Digital unveils 20TB OptiNAND hard drive, pledges 50TB to follow
- Reference: 1630495258
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/01/western_digital_unveils_20tb_optinand/
- Source link:
Adding flash to traditional mechanical hard drives is not a new concept. Western Digital announced its first work on the concept [1]back in 2011 after being beaten to market by rival Seagate's [2]Momentus XT , a year prior. In both cases, the solid-state flash acted as a temporary buffer for the most commonly accessed data - attempting to blend the best of both storage worlds.
OptiNAND, though, is positioned differently. Rather than simply improving throughput and access time for the user's most commonly examined data, an OptiNAND-enabled drive is claimed to offer increased overall capacity, improved performance across the whole disk, and a fiftyfold increase in the amount of data retained if you accidentally pull the power in the middle of a write.
[3]
The heart of the system, beyond the spinning platters themselves, is a Universal Flash Storage (UFS)-standard Embedded Flash Drive (EFD) dubbed iNAND, developed at Western Digital subsidiary SanDisk. Rather than acting as a simple cache, the iNAND disk handles metadata on write positions and volumes - as part of a refresh system meant to avoid adjacent track interference, where a frequently written track will begin to influence data stored on the tracks around it.
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[5]After quietly switching to slower NAND in an NVMe SSD, Western Digital promises to be a bit louder next time
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[7]Pull your Western Digital My Book Live NAS off the internet now if you value your files
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"It used to be, not that many generations ago, that you could write 10,000 times before needing to refresh sectors on either side," Western Digital engineering fellow David Hall explained in an interview for the [9]company blog . "And then as we pushed the tracks closer and closer together, it went to 100, then 50, then 10, and now for some sectors, it's as low as six."
Traditional refresh systems rely on tracking these metadata in DRAM, but the accuracy is limited. Tracking the same metadata in more capacious iNAND, or so Western Digital has claimed, improves the accuracy - and allows its engineers to boost the areal density of the mechanical portions of the drive, packing more storage into the same number of platters.
[10]
[11]
The first OptiNAND drives, sampling to "select customers" now, combine the technology with energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) to offer 20TB of storage across nine platters - 2.2TB per platter, the company's highest areal density yet.
At the same time OptiNAND is claimed to offer boosted performance by reducing the number of track interference refreshes required as well as the number of write-cache flushes. The latter also ties in to claims of improved reliability, with WD having claimed that an OptiNAND drive can retain "nearly 50x more customer data" in the event of an unexpected shutdown.
[12]
"With our IP and world-class development teams in HDD and flash, we are able to continuously push the boundaries of innovation to improve our customers' storage infrastructure," boasted Siva Sivaram, president of global technology and strategy at Western Digital.
"We have had an extraordinary journey of HDD innovation. We changed everything with [13]HelioSeal in 2013 ; were first to ship [14]energy-assisted HDDs in volume in 2019; and now we’re going to lead again with OptiNAND technology. This architecture will underpin our HDD technology roadmap for multiple generations as we expect that an ePMR HDD with OptiNAND will reach 50TB in the second half of the decade."
Western Digital had not responded to a query regarding pricing and commercial availability of the 20TB OptiNAND drive at the time of publication. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/07/wd_hybrid_drive/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/21/seagate_momentus_xt/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YS@jwZCeJW0mXzoPBVGLdgAAAEg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/28/samsung_storage_components/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/27/western_digital_components/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/05/chia_hdd_sales_context/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/25/western_digital_nas_wiped/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/us_hdd_export_probe/
[9] https://blog.westerndigital.com/optinand/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YS@jwZCeJW0mXzoPBVGLdgAAAEg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YS@jwZCeJW0mXzoPBVGLdgAAAEg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YS@jwZCeJW0mXzoPBVGLdgAAAEg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/13/hgst_helium_filled_disks/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/04/wd_mamr_drives/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
> but I can't see it speeding up R/W performance like, say, the traditional "flash cache" drives do.
I think it might not be a raw bitrate speedup, it sounds like an overhead reduction that effectively, from a users point of view, results in more data being read/written in the same time period. Sorta like when PCIe went from 8b/10b encoding to 128b/130b encoding with v3 (for PCie prev3, transferring 128b of 'user' data would actually require transferring 160b of raw data, PCIe3 changed this to requiring only 130b of raw data to get that 128b of user data). Since that extra metadata is in NAND instead of bits on the disk, it doesn't take up data read/write bandwidth from the platters to retrieve/store this metadata.
Actually, some of it is mentioned (peripherally) in the article:
At the same time OptiNAND is claimed to offer boosted performance by reducing the number of track interference refreshes required as well as the number of write-cache flushes
All of those operations take time that could be being used for reading/writing user data to the platters instead of pausing user read/write operations for these maintenance tasks.
Why so modest
Why so modest, Mr Siva?
"We were first to try to con our customers into buying SMR-based "NAS" drives not fit for purpose and almost got away with it".
"We have pioneered pushing 7200 RPM HDDs as "5400-class" drives to people who have made a conscious decision to go with slower RPM for energy, noise and/or vibration considerations".
"We have invented the marketing technology to switch out SSD components for inferior ones in the middle of the product's lifecycle without changing its name or letting anyone know".
Seriously, F off, WDC
WD claims WD is doing awesome things
Sounds legit. :| Wondering how this factors into their shingled stealth cheapertech innovationalism...
I can't decide if this them doing something new with the HDD storage side of this product, or if what they are doing is essentially shingling on the HDD and using the flash to overcome the worst performance hits of that. If it is different from shingling I wonder if the two techniques could be combined for a further performance boost.
Don't know, Don't care
Ages ago, when I built a PC, I went with WD because they were the best on the market.
Now, I have no idea if any of their claims are true.
But they've fiddled so much with their HDs and SSDs behind their customers' backs that even if the claims are true today, there is no assurance that they will be true tomorrow. WD has a long way to go if they want to get off my 'don'f trust, don't buy' list.
20 & 50TB
That's a lot of eggs in one basket, if/when something happens to the hard drive.
I was recently looking for a hard drive for use by just the operating system. The smallest I could find locally was 1TB. Yeah, yeah, I know I could partition it to something reasonable. But still, hard drives are mechanical devices. Separate, smaller hard drives would lessen the pain, if something happened. Not everyone is an expert in recovery. Back-ups? Too many people don't understand properly, the how and worse, the why. Bigger is not always better.
Don't get me started on TV/monitors in restricted spaces.
Re: 20 & 50TB
I'm afraid I don't understand your point. What is the value in having smaller partitions or smaller drives? With modern filesystems, significant corruption basically doesn't happen, and having multiple drives presumably increases your chances that mechanical failure will happen, increasing the odds of some sort of data loss. If you want redundancy, buy two large drives instead of one and create a mirror set. Ultimately, there's no substitute for backups, though. While most people may not understand how to do backups in the traditional sense of separate physical media, I think many people at this point have at least some awareness of cloud backup solutions (OneDrive or Google Drive, to name just two), which help protect the data users care most about. While the traditionalists among us may turn their noses up at the idea of cloud backups, for most people, backing up to the cloud is still an improvement on what they would have otherwise.
Old fart rant inside...
I recently purchased a WD 16Tb desktop external drive for doing backups & archival storeage. I was nonplussed when it turned out to only have 14Tb of formatted space & only 12Tb of user space available. I swear to Cthulhu's chocolate frosted knickers that it should be illegal to market a drive as $CapacityX in the large print, only to qualify that as $CapacityY in the small print & a further reduction to $CapacityZ for the actual user space. If I wanted a 12Tb drive I would have bought a 12Tb drive. I bought a 16Tb drive in the naieve belief that it wouldn't lose a quarter of the advertised space to something entirely beyond my control. If you have to format it to use it, and that formatting reduces the drive by an amount that is not inconsiderate, then you should be forced to market the drive as it's formatted size instead. I'll stop bitching & moaning now. It's time for my dried frog pills...
Re: Old fart rant inside...
It's not upto WD how much space your OS filesystem reserves for it's own use.
If I install VMS and reserve 50% of the space for previous file versions that isn't really the drive makers problem
Sounds to me like, in this case. "boosting performance" actually means "getting performance back to where it was before we started playing silly buggers with areal density".
Holding the metadata and indices in "iNand" may well reduce the need to refresh adjacent tracks, but I can't see it speeding up R/W performance like, say, the traditional "flash cache" drives do.
Having said that, the increased density usually produces a hike over lower capacity platters and we'll probably get to see this, rather than losing it to packing overhead as is more usual these days.