Western Digital to start the shipments of its OptiNAND 20TB HDD’s from November 2021

Western Digital has just reported that the company will reportedly be starting the volume shipments of its 20TB hard drives which feature OptiNAND technology and the shipments begin from next month. The company is a leading manufacturer of storage solutions and its OptiNAND technology uses a NAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD) with an HDD to improve performance, reliability, and capacity.

However, many are wondering as to whether the high storage offering from Western Digital will be made available to consumers.

“Next month, we will commence volume shipments of our 20TB CMR hard drives based on OptiNAND technology,” said David Goeckler, chief executive of Western Digital.

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Western Digital’s 20TB HDDs with OptiNAND rely heavily on the company’s familiar nine-platter 7200RPM helium-filled platform which uses energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR).

The main advantage of using the OptiNAND is that it stores various kinds of metadata data on the EFD instead of rotating the media. The OptiNAND technology-free ups the onboard and makes metadata related to repeatable runout (RRO) and adjacent track interference (ATI) is available to the controller faster and optimize performance.

Modern HDDs these days store quite a significant amount of metadata hence offloading the metadata to NAND makes perfect sense both from a usable capacity and performance point of view and OptiNAND technology can also provide significance. Furthermore, OptiNAND also significantly boosts the reliability of HDDs.

According to the official description given by Western Digital, its OptiNAND-equipped HDDs are meant for cloud data centers and enterprises. But, the OptiNAND is also poised to solve performance and effective area density challenges of all hard drives, hence there is nothing to stop a user from installing such a drive into a desktop or NAS and taking advantage of all the features that OptiNAND has to offer.

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