When Western Digital launched its 22TB laborious drives earlier this yr, the corporate solely supplied them in its Ultrastar lineup. This drive household is designed primarily for server makers and isn’t extensively obtainable within the channel or retail. Nevertheless, this week Western Digital started (opens in new tab) to ship 22TB WD Gold, WD Crimson Professional, and WD Purple Professional HDDs that shall be obtainable to a significantly wider viewers.
Western Digital’s 22TB HDDs share the identical 10-platter 3.5-inch helium-filled platform that depends on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) know-how and triple-stage actuators (TSA) to take care of a really excessive observe density. The drives are enhanced with OptiNAND know-how to enhance real-world efficiency by transferring repeatable runout (RRO) metadata from magnetic media to NAND flash reminiscence and bettering reliability. The laborious drives function a 7,200-RPM spindle pace and a 512MB cache.
Since Western Digital’s 22TB WD Gold HDDs (opens in new tab) function the best areal density up to now, it is not stunning that in addition they supply a most sustained switch charge of 291 MB/s, the best we have ever seen on a tough drive. As for energy consumption, these drives devour 5.7W (in step with lower-capacity drives) in idle mode and 9.3W in operational mode (considerably larger than lower-capacity drives). In the meantime, the 22TB WD Crimson Professional (opens in new tab) and WD Purple Professional (opens in new tab) are rated for a 265 MB/s sustained switch charge and 6.8W/3.4W and 6.9W/5.6W operational/idle energy consumption, respectively.
Since all Western Digital’s 22TB laborious drives are designed for multi-drive environments, they function enterprise-grade options to spice up their reliability and guarantee predictable efficiency, together with a high and backside hooked up motor, RV sensors, and different means to scale back turbulence. However though numerous 22TB HDDs from Western Digital have loads in frequent, they’re geared toward completely different purposes and subsequently have some variations on the {hardware} degree and fully completely different firmware optimizations.
Western Digital historically positions its WD Gold for servers and workstations, so the total focus of those drives is on their reliability and predictable efficiency. In contrast, the corporate’s WD Crimson Professional is designed for enterprise-grade NAS with as much as 24 bays and subsequently is optimized for multi-user 24×7 environments and high-intensity workloads. Curiously, WD Crimson Professional is the one 22TB HDD rated for a 300TB annual workload, as different members of the 22TB membership are rated for a 550TB annual workload. Lastly, Western Digital’s WD Purple Professional HDDs are developed for video surveillance, good video recorders, and comparable purposes, which is why they’ll deal with as much as 64 single-stream HD cameras and assist AllFrame AI know-how which helps 32 AI streams for deep-learning analytics.
Western Digital’s WD Gold/WD Crimson Professional/WD Purple Professional 22TB laborious drives at the moment are obtainable at an MSRP of $599. As well as, all of the HDDs are lined with a five-year guarantee and are rated for a imply time between failure (MTBF) of two.5 million hours.
