Western Digital introduced a 20TB mechanical hard drive

Western Digital officially released a 20TB mechanical hard drive on September 1. In addition to the traditional disk body, this product also uses OptiNAND technology, integrates iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD) on the circuit board, and uses a 3D TLC UFS flash memory chip of unknown capacity.

Western Digital CEO David Goeckler said in a conference call with analysts and investors that volume shipments of 20TB hard drives using OptiNAND technology will begin in November.

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Moreover, this hard drive contains 9 discs, with a single disc capacity of approximately 2.2TB, and uses ePMR (Energy Assisted Vertical Recording Technology). The magnetic head uses a more precise three-stage drive technology, which enables precise positioning of the read and writes heads. The SoC control chip of the hard disk is independently developed by Western Digital.

Furthermore, OptiNAND adds a number of advantages to the platform. Both RRO data and write operation metadata can be stored in iNAND flash memory, which not only reduces the hard disk space occupation but also greatly reduces the number of hard disk read and writes operations (IO number).

In short, UFS flash memory can also store sector-level write operation data, which can optimize storage requirements and reduce ATI (adjacent track interference data) refresh times to improve performance. Besides,  Western Digital’s 20TB OptiNAND mechanical hard drive is suitable for cloud data centers and enterprises, and it is not clear whether it will be sold in consumer channels.