OptiNAND 20 TB HDDs are coming. When will Western Digital begin delivering?

Western Digital revealed that customers can expect a mass shipment of new products in the form of hard drives for data center applications in November. There are exactly 20 TB of OptiNAND HDDs at stake, which use a special additional FLASH memory chip to increase performance, reliability and capacity.

20-TB OptiNAND HDDs from Western Digital

At the moment, the issue of introducing HDD OptiNAND to the consumer market remains unknown, but nothing prevents these 20-TB drives from reaching ordinary computers. Maybe in the future we will see rationally priced variants with a lower capacity? It is definitely worth waiting for, because the OptiNAND technology uses a deck of Flash iNAND UFS (EFD) memory built directly into the HDD.

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Western Digital’s 20 TB hard drives with OptiNAND, however, are based on the company’s traditional and well-known 9-disc helium configuration, in which the platters rotate at 7,200 rpm. These disks use ePMR and with the addition of OptiNAND, they do not have to disassemble the platters to gain access to various types of metadata, which increases the performance and response of the controller to a given read / write operation.

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As the amount of metadata stored on modern hard drives is quite substantial, moving it to onboard NAND makes sense both in terms of usable capacity and performance. In addition, OptiNAND also increases the reliability of hard drives.