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A Spinning Potato: It's 2024, and hardware manufacturers are still competing to see who can produce the highest-capacity hard disk drives on the market. Seagate recently introduced its HAMR-powered Mozaic 3+ HDD platform, and Western Digital has responded with its first 32TB magnetic storage units.
Western Digital has announced an unexpected new capacity for its enterprise-focused hard disk drives. The San Jose company is now shipping the first samples of a new 32TB UltraSMR HDD unit, a nearline drive equipped with many of WD's advanced technology solutions. Select customers are currently testing these drives in their infrastructure.
The 32TB hard disk drive is based on advanced shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a somewhat controversial technology designed to increase storage density by slightly overlapping magnetic tracks to store digital bits. Compared to traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), SMR drives can experience performance and reliability issues. In 2020, WD faced criticism for selling SMR drives without informing customers about the cost-cutting measure.
The new 32TB drives incorporate some of the latest recording technologies from WD, such as energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR), which uses a laser diode to rapidly heat a tiny spot on the magnetic disk. Similar to Seagate's Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), EAMR aims to provide a significant increase in areal density while maintaining reliability in data retention.
WD's 32TB HDD also includes the Flash-based cache memory solution OptiNAND, a proprietary error-correction technology. According to WD CEO David Goeckeler, the new units can be easily integrated and deployed in pre-existing hyperscale data centers for cloud and enterprise ventures, thanks to their triple-stage actuators.
Like previous UltraSMR drives, the new unit requires additional management compared to non-SMR drives from other manufacturers. WD is clearly targeting customers already using its HDDs, offering a 20 percent increase in capacity over other SMR implementations. It is hoped that UltraSMR drives will not have reliability issues at this point.
While WD is focused on UltraSMR technology, Seagate introduced its non-shingled magnetic drives earlier this year. The Fremont-headquartered corporation is now selling the first units of its new 30TB Mozaic 3+ drives, which use post-PMR HAMR technology to provide seemingly higher reliability compared to older HDD models.