Western Digital’s “What’s Next” event, dating back to May 2022, unveiled a 22TB platform based on ePMR and OptiNAND (using ArmorCache). At the event, WD will bring 22TB 10 platter drives to market in a variety of product categories: Ultrastar DC HC570 for data centers and enterprises, WD Gold for enterprises, SMEs, and SMBs, and WD Red Pro for SMBs and SME NAS. I showed that. WD Purple Pro for systems and surveillance network video recorders.
Today, WD announces retail availability and technical details for these models. All drives have a 3.5 inch form factor and a SATA 6 Gbps interface. The drive is equipped with a 512MB cache and has a spindle speed of 7200rpm. The acoustic ratings for all drives are the same. The acoustic rating at idle is 20dBA. 32dBA for average seek.
| Western Digital 202222TB Hard Drive-Indicators of Interest | |||
| WD Gold | WD Red Pro | WD Purple Pro | |
| Rated workload (TB / year) | 550 | 300 | 550 |
| maximum. Sustained transfer rate (MBps) | 291 | 265 | 265 |
| Rated load / unload cycle | 600K | 600K | 600K |
| Unrecoverable read error | 1 in 10E15 | 1 in 10E13 | 1 in 10E15 |
| MTBF (time) | 2.5M | 1M | 2.5M |
| Power (idle / active) (W) | 5.7 / 9.3 | 3.4 / 6.8 | 5.6 / 6.9 |
| Warranty (year) | Five | Five | Five |
| Pricing | ?? | ?? | ?? |
Based on the above specifications, it is clear that Western Digital has adopted the ePMR / OptiNAND / Triple Stage Actuator platform and properly tuned the firmware to accommodate different market segments. The Red Pro CMR drive features features such as parameter adjustment based on an integrated multi-axis shock sensor, balance maintenance using dual plane balance control technology, and a TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) configuration for compatibility. Comes with NASware 3.0 firmware including. With various NAS systems. By convention in the Red Pro family, we recommend the new 22TB drive for use on systems with up to 24 bays.
The WD Purple Pro drive for network video recording is tuned with firmware for writing to multiple drive areas simultaneously and continuously. WD demonstrates the drive’s ability to process up to 64 simultaneous HD stream recordings at 3.25 Mbps and up to 32 streams for machine learning / object discovery tasks. Similar to RedPro’s NASware 3.0, the custom firmware has a specific Monica (AllFrame AI).
WD Gold is the flagship of today’s retail launch announcement. The firmware has been tuned for the best possible performance without focusing on active and idle power numbers. The ArmorCache feature is specifically turned on only on the WD Gold 22TB model.
The overall driving force of these high capacity hard drives is one of the TCOs. You can reduce the physical footprint of storage servers of the same capacity, resulting in significant savings in related IT costs associated with power, cooling, and rack space. In the future, WD hopes to be able to handle access speed stagnation compared to capacity (using dual actuators or other similar technologies). This makes high capacity HDDs attractive to home consumers / prosumers who are naturally worried that RAID rebuilding will take a long time.
