In an unexpected move, Western Digital announced its first dual actuator hard disk drive (HDD) on Monday.dual actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 20TB HDD (opens in new tab) Built on the proven single-actuator Ultrastar DC HC560 drive, it doubles the sequential read/write speed and almost doubles the random read/write performance. The main advantage of new HDDs for hyperscale cloud data centers is his increased IOPS per terabyte.
The Ultrastar DC HS760 20TB Dual Actuator Hard Drive uses Western Digital’s 3rd generation OptiNAND platform, featuring nine 2.2TB ePMR (Energy Assisted Perpendicular Recording Technology) platters and NAND flash cache to store metadata. , writes cache data, improves performance, and increases areal density. .
Two independent actuators in the drive work in parallel, delivering 2x the sequential throughput (up to 582 MB/s) and 1.7x the random performance over single-actuator HDDs, and two separate hard drives. Consumes up to 37% less power than drives. For some reason Western Digital has not released detailed specifications for its product, but expect to see a datasheet soon.
The Ultrastar DC HS760 drives are accessed via single-port SAS and presented as two 10TB Logical Unit Number (LUN) SAS devices. Logical HDDs are individually addressable, requiring software tweaks on the host side. As such, not all data centers will be able to use the new drives.
Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC HS760 20TB HDD offers higher capacity than Seagate’s dual-actuator Exos 2X18 18TB hard drive, but Seagate also offers drives with SATA interfaces, making it compatible with a wider range of customers. there is.
As HDD capacity increases, the IOPS random read/write performance per TB decreases, making it difficult for data centers to maintain quality of service. Dual actuator HDDs solve this problem by significantly improving HDD performance at the cost of slightly higher power consumption.
Like all Western Digital Ultrastar drives, the DC HS760 20TB comes with a 5-year warranty and is designed to operate in a 24/7 environment. Each LUN is designed to handle workloads of up to 500 TB per year. This is slightly lower than the typical data center HDD annual workload of 550 TB.
Western Digital hasn’t disclosed pricing for dual-actuator HDDs, but they’ll be higher than single-actuator hard drives. And since these storage devices are designed for data centers, actual pricing will vary based on many factors, including volume and long-term contracts established or new.
