Company Leverages Core HDD and Flash
Capabilities to Help Customers Meet Exponential Demand for Data
Storage; Innovative Drive Architecture Sets New Areal Density
Milestone
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.
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the full release here:
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OptiNAND technology seamlessly integrates
iNAND Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Embedded Flash Drive (EFD) with
spinning disk media to enable higher areal density, improved
performance and an increase in total reliability. (Graphic:
Business Wire)
Leveraging industry-first technologies including triple-stage
actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal® technology, the first products
featuring the new drive architecture will deliver an unsurpassed
2.2TB per platter, extending capacity gains on proven ePMR
technology. Setting a new industry milestone, Western Digital has
shipped samples of new nine-disk, 20TB 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:
- 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.
“With our IP and world-class development teams in HDD and flash,
we are able to continuously push the boundaries of innovation to
improve our customers’ storage infrastructure,” said Siva Sivaram,
president of Global Technology and Strategy, Western Digital. “We
have had an extraordinary journey of HDD innovation. We changed
everything with HelioSeal in 2013; were first to ship
energy-assisted HDDs in volume in 2019; and now we’re going to lead
again with OptiNAND technology. This architecture will underpin our
HDD technology roadmap for multiple generations as we expect that
an ePMR HDD with OptiNAND will reach 50TB in the second half of the
decade.”
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.
Additional Resources:
- Reimagining HDDs with OptiNAND™ Technology
- How Western Digital Created OptiNAND™, a New Flash-Enhanced
Drive Architecture
- The Magnetic Attraction of ePMR
About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. As a
leader in data infrastructure, the company is driving the
innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and
transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data
lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal
devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities
of data. Western Digital data-centric solutions are comprised of
the Western Digital®, G-Technology™, SanDisk® and WD® brands.
One terabyte (TB) is equal to one trillion bytes. Actual user
capacity may be less due to operating environment.
Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, iNAND, HelioSeal and
OptiNAND are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital
Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. All
other marks are the property of their respective owners. Pictures
shown may vary from actual products.
© 2021 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights
reserved.
Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements,
including the expected applications, availability, benefits,
features and performance of, as well as growth opportunities and
demand trends for, OptiNAND technology. There are a number of risks
and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements
to be inaccurate including, among others: future responses to and
effects of the COVID-19 pandemic; volatility in global economic
conditions; impact of business and market conditions; impact of
competitive products and pricing; our development and introduction
of products based on new technologies and expansion into new data
storage markets; risks associated with cost saving initiatives,
restructurings, acquisitions, divestitures, mergers, joint ventures
and our strategic relationships; difficulties or delays in
manufacturing or other supply chain disruptions; hiring and
retention of key employees; our substantial level of debt and other
financial obligations; changes to our relationships with key
customers; disruptions in operations from cyberattacks or other
system security risks; actions by competitors; risks associated
with compliance with changing legal and regulatory requirements and
the outcome of legal proceedings; and other risks and uncertainties
listed in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, including the company’s most recently filed periodic
report, to which your attention is directed. You should not place
undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak
only as of the date hereof, and the company undertakes no
obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect
subsequent events or circumstances.
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210831005151/en/
Erin Hartin Western Digital Public Relations 303-601-8035
erin.hartin@wdc.com
T. Peter Andrew Western Digital Investor Relations
1-800-695-6399 investor@wdc.com
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