Western Digital has launched a new mechanical hard drive that uses the OptiNAND flash memory technology and features nine platters of 2.2 TB each, reaching a total capacity of almost 20 TB. The new drive’s flash memory is an integrated EFD sitting on the circuit board, and it also features a 3D TLC UFS flash memory of unknown technical specs. WD is going for a highly reliable “smart” mechanical drive that offers high performance. To clarify, this is not a hybrid drive.
The nine platters – or disks, if you prefer – are read by a magnetic head that uses a three-stage actuator drive for higher precision and uses ePMR (Energy Assisted Vertical Recording Technology). The SoC control chip of the disk is proprietary and was developed internally by Western Digital.
In numbers, Western Digital
claims its new HDD product can flush 100 MB of write cache data into iNAND, going 50 times higher than what the previous generation could achieve (2 MB). This figure is very important for those who care about reliability in cases of data emergency or sudden power cuts. Thanks to firmware optimizations that reduce the drive’s latency as well as the need for ATI refreshes and write cache flushes in WCE mode, the new HDD performs better than anything else of this type.
