Western Digital 20TB HDDs Spotted Selling for $679.99 | Is It Worth It?

Urian B., Tech Times 17 November 2021, 01:11 am

Western Digital has just revealed two 20TB HDDs with its new WD Gold HDD and Ultrastar DC HC560. The company's brand new large capacity HDDs are now available in the standard 3.5-inch form factor while featuring the company's proprietary OptiNAND technology.

OptiNAND Integrates INAND UFS EFD

According to the story by TechRadar, OptiNAND actually integrates the INAND UFS EFD with other traditional spinning disks. This allows it to pack up to 20TB inot nine platters containing 2.2TB of storage each.

The 20TB WD Gold HDD and the 20TB Ultrastar DC HC560 both utilize Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording or EAMR. They also utilize HelioSeal tech in order to reduce air drag on the triple-stage actuator and rotating platters.

President of Global Technology and Strategy Gave Statements

Siva Sivaram, the president of global technology and strategy, gave further insight regarding the company's technologies. Her insights were published in a blog post some time this year.

Sivaram noted that with their IP as well as world-class development teams when it comes to HDD and flash, they are capable of continuously pushing the boundaries of innovation in order to improve their customer's storage infrastructure. Sivaram said that the company had an extraordinary journey of HDD innovation.

Potential 50TB?

It was noted that they changed everything with HelioSeal back in 2013. They were first to ship energy-assisted HDDs when it comes to volume in 2019. Sivaram says that they are now going to lead yet again with OptiNAND technology.

The architecture will help underpin their HDD technology roadmap for the upcoming generations and they now expect that an ePMR HDD along with OptiNAND will help them reach 50TB1 in the second half of this decade. Despite a lot of PC users making the switch to SDDs for their storage due to speed increase, HDD drives that have magnetic tape are also still frequently used when it comes to storing massive amounts of data.

Western Digital HDDs

Although the new HDDs from Western Digital both feature the exact same amount of storage, the use cases for these storages remain a bit different. The new Ultrastar DC HC560 will most likely be used by certain cloud storage providers as well as small business servers, NAS devices, and business security systems.

Western Digital's WD Gold HDD, on the other hand, is designed for enterprise businesses that are running certain heavy-duty workloads for longer periods of time. The 20TB WD Gold HDD is going to retail for $679.99 while the company has not yet announced the price of its Ultrastar DC HC560.

The Ultrastar DC H560's predecessor, the Ultrastar DC HC550 is currently available for $400. The HDD, as of the moment, is only capable of running 18TB of storage which although isn't far from 20TB, a single TB still makes a huge difference. As for whether or not 20TB is worth it, this highly depends on how the storage is being used.

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Written by Urian B.