Western Digital launches first hard disks with eleven disks and up to 32 TByte
Hard disks are getting even thinner: Western Digital squeezes eleven disks into a standard hard disk enclosure and thus achieves 26 TByte; with UltraSMR even 32.
(Image: Western Digital)
The hard disks are getting tighter and tighter: whereas the high-capacity hard disks from Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital used to have a maximum of ten disks, there are now eleven – at least in the new drives from Western Digital. The disks in the DC HC590, DC HC690 and WD Gold 26 TB models are less than half a millimeter thick – More on the differences in a moment.
The DC HC590 and DC HC690 rotate at 7200 revolutions per minute, have 512 MB of cache memory and are available with SAS and SATA connections. During the warranty period of five years, the drives can write or read 550 TByte per year and the average failure rate is said to be a low 0.35 percent per year. The probability of bit errors is one sector per 1015 bits – a common value for enterprise hard disks. The heads have a three-stage actuator for fast and precise positioning, a NAND flash module is used to store disk data (OptiNAND) and as a write cache, Western Digital calls the technology Armorcache. Write support is provided by a technology called ePMR (Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), in which an additional current is applied to the main pole of the write head during the entire write process. The additional magnetic field generated in this way should lead to a more even magnetization and reduce jitter. According to WD, this minimizes the distance between the written bits.
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Subtle differences
The difference lies in the recording technology: While the DC HC590 uses conventional recording technology (Conventional Magnetic Recording, CMR) and thus achieves a capacity of 26 TByte, the DC HC690 achieves 32 TByte thanks to UltraSMR (a further development of Shingled Magnetic Recording with extended error correction). The third hard disk, the WD Gold, is almost identical to the SATA version of the DC HC590 and is intended for retail. Interested parties will therefore be able to easily purchase these individually in future.
When idle, the SATA versions of the data center models consume 5.5 watts, but in operation the SMR version consumes 9.4 watts, just under one watt more than the CMR drive. The drives with SAS connection require between 0.2 and 0.3 watts more. The CMR hard disks are also slightly faster with a maximum of 291 MByte/s in the outer zones than the SMR version, which achieves a maximum of 276 MByte/s.
According to the press release, the CMR drives are available immediately, but there is no information yet on the availability of the DC HC690. However, the WD Gold is not yet listed in the price comparison. Western Digital is already asking 710 euros for the WD Gold 24 TB; it costs slightly less in stores (starting from 692,94 €). The 26 TB should therefore land somewhere between 700 and 800 euros.
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