Western Digital has announced its upcoming 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 and 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDDs, the primary of their form. However in an age of tremendous speedy SSDs, you may surprise what the purpose of popping out with but extra exhausting disk drives can do for us, as a species—notably us players.
HDDs may not be as speedy as the SSDs of today, however the capability continues to be miles forward. And with WD spearheading the motion, these numbers are actually reaching unprecedented heights. Inside a decade we’re prone to be seeing 30TB, even 40TB capacities hitting servers.
Given the possibility, us mere mortals may match 104 copies of the 250GB DCS World, or 152 copies of Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is a whopping 170GB. However these unhealthy boys aren’t for accomodating your large sport library, filled with unprecedented storage hogs. These drives are supposed to stay for the cloud.
“As a longstanding associate of the business’s main cloud suppliers, we perceive their distinctive necessities in constructing next-generation cloud infrastructure,” Ashley Gorakhpurwalla of WD explains. The corporate, as such, has “invested in a number of HDD improvements we developed alongside our areal density expertise.”
The plan? “Ship on a roadmap that will additionally assist the evolving economics of their knowledge facilities for many years to return.” It comes as a sequel to the announcement of WD’s 20TB OptiNAND HDD monsters final 12 months, and works a lot the identical means however with some spicy new installments.
The journey has concerned launching energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), which allowed WD to jam extra bits per inch onto their platters; OptiNAND, the lovechild of HDD and NAND tech; and now WD has are available in with UltraSMR.
SMR, which stands for Shingled Magnetic Recording, is not a revelation within the HDD area. Shingled storage has been round since Seagate launched it in 2013, and upped potential storage capability by a few quarter of what it was.
WD says the brand new UltraSMR has improved the tech by including in “massive block encoding together with a sophisticated error correction algorithm that will increase tracks-per-inch (TPI) to allow larger capability.”
That is all fantastic, however except you might have entry to a server room with spare HDDs, us plebs are unlikely to get ahold of 26TB HDDs anytime quickly. Not that we actually want them. I imply, how many people swap between 100 or extra storage-hogging video games on the common?
