Western Digital’s ‘What’s Subsequent’ occasion again in Might 2022 had seen the announcement of its 22TB platform based mostly on ePMR and OptiNAND (with ArmorCache). On the occasion, WD indicated that the 22TB 10-platter drives would make its market look below totally different product classes – Ultrastar DC HC570 for information facilities and enterprises, WD Gold for enterprises, SMEs, and SMBs, WD Crimson Professional for SMB and SME NAS techniques, and WD Purple Professional for surveillance community video recorders.
Right this moment, WD is saying retail availability of those fashions together with technical particulars. All drives have a 3.5″ form-factor and sport a SATA 6 Gbps interface. The drives are outfitted with a 512MB cache and have a 7200 rpm spindle velocity. The acoustics ranking for all of them are the identical too – 20 dBA at idle and 32 dBA for the typical search.
| Western Digital 2022 22TB Exhausting Drives – Metrics of Curiosity | |||
| Â | WD Gold | WD Crimson Professional | WD Purple Professional |
| Rated Workload (TB/yr) | 550 | 300 | 550 |
| Max. Sustained Switch Fee (MBps) | 291 | 265 | 265 |
| Rated Load / Unload Cycles | 600K | 600K | 600K |
| Unrecoverable Learn Errors | 1 in 10E15 | 1 in 10E13 | 1 in 10E15 |
| MTBF (Hours) | 2.5M | 1M | 2.5M |
| Energy (Idle / Lively) (W) | 5.7 / 9.3 | 3.4 / 6.8 | 5.6 / 6.9 |
| Guarantee (Years) | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Pricing | $600 | $600 | $600 |
Primarily based on the above specs, it’s clear that Western Digital has taken the ePMR / OptiNAND / triple-stage actuator platform and tweaked the firmware suitably to cater to totally different market segments. The Crimson Professional CMR drive comes with NASware 3.0 firmware that features options equivalent to adjusting parameters based mostly on the built-in multi-axis shock sensor, sustaining steadiness utilizing the dual-plane steadiness management know-how, and TLER (Time-Restricted Error Restoration) configuration for compatibility with numerous NAS techniques. As is customary for the Crimson Professional household, the brand new 22TB drives are really helpful for utilization in techniques with as much as 24 bays.
The WD Purple Professional drives meant for community video recordings has firmware tweaked for steady sequential writes to a number of drive areas concurrently. WD signifies the potential of the drive to deal with as much as 64 concurrent HD stream recordings at 3.25 Mbps, and as much as 32 streams for machine studying / object detection duties. Much like NASware 3.0 within the Crimson Professional, the customized firmware has a particular moniker – AllFrame AI.
The WD Gold is the flagship in at present’s retail launch announcement. It is firmware is tweaked for the best doable efficiency, with out specializing in the lively and idle energy numbers. The ArmorCache characteristic is particularly turned on within the WD Gold 22TB mannequin solely.
Apparently, all of the three drives have been launched with the identical MSRP of $600. Although the WD Crimson Professional has a a lot decrease workload ranking, peak efficiency quantity, and reliability metric (MTBF), it seems that WD believes the market shall be prepared to pay a premium for the decrease energy consumption numbers.
The general push with these high-capacity laborious drives is considered one of TCO. The power to scale back bodily footprint of storage servers for a similar capability may end up in important financial savings in allied IT prices associated to energy, cooling, and rack house. Transferring ahead, WD can hopefully tackle the plateauing of entry speeds in comparison with capability (utilizing dual-actuators or another related know-how). This may make high-capacity HDDs engaging to residence customers / prosumers who could also be rightly apprehensive about lengthy RAID rebuild occasions.
