Tuesday, September 7th 2021
Western Digital Reimagines The Hard Drive with OptiNAND Technology
At the company's HDD Reimagine event today, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) introduced a new flash-enhanced drive architecture that breaks traditional boundaries of storage. Building on the company's unique ability to innovate with HDD and flash, the new storage architecture with OptiNAND technology optimizes and integrates HDDs with iNAND embedded flash drives. This gives customers - like hyperscale cloud, CSPs, enterprises, smart video surveillance partners, NAS suppliers and more - a solution to meet the exponential growth in data creation by delivering the capacity, performance and reliability needed to store vast amounts of data today and well into the future.
Leveraging industry-first technologies including triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal technology, the first products featuring the new drive architecture will deliver an unsurpassed 2.2 TB per platter, extending capacities gains on proven ePMR technology. Setting a new industry milestone, Western Digital has shipped samples of new nine-disk, 20 TB ePMR flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology to select customers.
"Western Digital has a history of hard drive architecture innovations, such as when HGST (now part of Western Digital) first hermetically sealed and shipped helium HDDs in 2013," said Ed Burns, research director for hard disk drives at IDC. "Driven by the growth of AI, ML, blockchain, IoT, sensors and more, there's no doubt that new storage innovations are needed to store and protect today's data growth, especially at scale. As the only company manufacturing both flash and HDDs, Western Digital can uniquely leverage their in-house capabilities to extend the areal density curve of ePMR drives for generations to come, helping customers meet the growing demands of a digital economy."
"This new architecture is a natural extension of Western Digital's strengths and capabilities, delivering a new evolution of storage to the market," said Billy Chen, vice president of New H3C Group, president of Compute and Storage Product Line. "As an early customer, the OptiNAND technology is exciting as it will help us meet our storage needs for years to come."
New Flash-Enhanced Drive with OptiNAND Technology
Unlike a hybrid drive where flash is used to store user data, the new architecture is a breakthrough in storage that works differently, enabling advances on multiple dimensions of storage capability. By adding vertically integrated iNAND to its world-class HDDs, and with enhanced firmware algorithm and SoC innovations, Western Digital's flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology deliver improved capacity, performance and reliability to help customers meet growing storage demands. A technology brief can be found here. Highlights include:
Availability
The new flash-enhanced drive architecture with OptiNAND technology will be available across the company's portfolio of drives and storage platforms. It will also serve as the foundation for future designs and innovations, with further advances to come in intelligence, reliability, capacity and time-to-market value. The company will begin announcing market-specific, purpose-built products across its portfolio later this year.
Leveraging industry-first technologies including triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal technology, the first products featuring the new drive architecture will deliver an unsurpassed 2.2 TB per platter, extending capacities gains on proven ePMR technology. Setting a new industry milestone, Western Digital has shipped samples of new nine-disk, 20 TB ePMR flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology to select customers.
"This new architecture is a natural extension of Western Digital's strengths and capabilities, delivering a new evolution of storage to the market," said Billy Chen, vice president of New H3C Group, president of Compute and Storage Product Line. "As an early customer, the OptiNAND technology is exciting as it will help us meet our storage needs for years to come."
New Flash-Enhanced Drive with OptiNAND Technology
Unlike a hybrid drive where flash is used to store user data, the new architecture is a breakthrough in storage that works differently, enabling advances on multiple dimensions of storage capability. By adding vertically integrated iNAND to its world-class HDDs, and with enhanced firmware algorithm and SoC innovations, Western Digital's flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology deliver improved capacity, performance and reliability to help customers meet growing storage demands. A technology brief can be found here. Highlights include:
- Capacity: The drive works smarter, with enhanced firmware algorithms taking advantage of expanded metadata that has been offloaded to the iNAND, enabling more tracks per inch (TPI) with resulting increased areal density.
- Performance: Drive latency is improved with proprietary optimizations to drive firmware focused on requiring fewer adjacent track interference (ATI) refreshes and reducing the need for write cache flushes in write cache-enabled mode.
- Reliability: Nearly 50x more customer data can be retained in the event of an emergency power off (EPO) scenario, and with Western Digital's unique capabilities in vertically integrated supply, design, development, testing and qualification of flash-enhanced drives, customers can count on the drive's reliability.
Availability
The new flash-enhanced drive architecture with OptiNAND technology will be available across the company's portfolio of drives and storage platforms. It will also serve as the foundation for future designs and innovations, with further advances to come in intelligence, reliability, capacity and time-to-market value. The company will begin announcing market-specific, purpose-built products across its portfolio later this year.
27 Comments on Western Digital Reimagines The Hard Drive with OptiNAND Technology
Isn't it just an SSHD ?
These drives still have a cache, it's just not part of the iNAND.www.anandtech.com/show/16920/western-digital-reimagines-hdd-flash-integration-with-optinandAnd this has what to do with the product announcement above?
This is an ePMR drive.Possibly, considering the metadata is stored in the flash. I guess it would be tricky to recover at least some data without it.Instead of making assumptions, maybe try to read up and understand what they've done?
I'd love to see an 8TB hard drive with 250GB of NAND running the same way as a QLC drive does - 250GB of fast cache which is written to the platters in the background. The downside would be that IOPS on small reads would be abysmal reading from disk but I'd imagine we're getting closer to file-level awareness in drive firmware that would allow files under 4kb to remain in the cache far longer.
"The downside would be that IOPS on small reads would be abysmal reading from disk but I'd imagine we're getting closer to file-level awareness in drive firmware that would allow files under 4kb to remain in the cache far longer."
seek times of 15ms aren't a problem for large files. it's the tiny stuff that's always choked spinning rust.
blog.westerndigital.com/optinand/Wont take long for WD to pull similar stunt with this format and blame customers for using too much storage drive.
The iNAND is not used for file buffering of any kind.
So far, I got that the flash stores some metadata that cuts down the number of sector refreshes needed. I don't see how that alone would increase capacity, for example, so there has to be more.
I would say that they've played up the increased capacity due to the metadata being taken off the platters, but in all honesty, I don't know how much metadata there is on a hard drive.
But also, on modern drive, Drive virtualize the cylinder and sectors data. Metadata will store all the actual location of each bytes on the platters. The larger the disk, the larger those table become.
*im drunk and may have mischaracterized these technologies but, still, case in point