Hot Take Western Digital doubles the performance of hard drives with dual-actuator High-Bandwidth, with path to 8X performance increase

[Parkinsond]

Although NAND memory has replaced traditional hard disk drives in the vast majority of client PCs, HDDs can still offer capacities at costs not achievable by solid-state drives today, particularly in the data center space.

The whole concept of Western Digital's High-Bandwidth HDD stems from reading data from the media using more than one head and transferring it to one or two hosts. The company showcases two types of High-Bandwidth HDDs at its Innovation Day: one uses more than one head for reading and writing at the same time to achieve 2X bandwidth compared to conventional HDDs, and another one features a second fully independent actuator to achieve 2X bandwidth and 2X sequential I/O performance. Over time, High-Bandwidth HDDs are projected to scale up bandwidth by eight times and I/O by four times when both approaches are combined within a single HDD.

Western Digital doubles the performance of hard drives with dual-actuator High-Bandwidth, with path to 8X performance increase — Power-Optimized HDDs will reduce power by 20 percent

Tailoring HDDs for applications.

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