Western Digital release highest capacity HDD ever
Things move quickly in the world of technology and data
storage; only last month we wrote about how Seagate had released the
world’s first 14TB HDDs but Western Digital have gone one better having
just unveiled their Ultrastar 15TB drive.
In order to achieve this unprecedented capacity, Western
Digital have utilised Shingled Magnetic Recording, a technique that increases
storage density by allowing data tracks to overlap with one another which
allows more data to be stored on a drive’s platters.
Unlike Seagate, who released several variations of their
14TB drive, Western Digital have opted to release just one version of the
Ultrastar but claim that the extra 1TB of storage could yield an additional
60TB of storage per server. As a data centre’s profitability is directly linked
to the amount of storage it can offer within its limited space, Western Digital
claim that data centres that switch to their latest drive will see a significant
return on investment.
A spokesperson for the hard drive manufacturer added "With
data continuing to grow at unprecedented rates, many hyperscale and cloud
storage customers know that their workloads trend toward data that is written
sequentially. In these instances, customers are optimizing their
infrastructures with the lowest TCO and the maximum capacity. By capitalizing
on our highest-capacity SMR storage solutions, our customers’ investment can
not only be fully leveraged today, but for subsequent generations of SMR areal
density improvements for continued infrastructure optimization."
Why high-capacity
HDDs still matter
The demand for HDDs amongst home users may be falling
because of the rise of flash-based storage such as SSDs, but the commercial
world – who are reliant upon high capacity, high density drives – still prefer
HDDs due to their superior capacities and lower costs.
Our growing need for data storage also fuels the need for
higher capacity media of all kinds. The
amount of data we’re creating is growing at an exponential rate for a
number of reasons and, whilst a number of innovative solutions such as DNA
data storage have been proposed, none are currently regarded as practicable
and are plagued with problems such as excessively high costs or prohibitively
poor read and write speeds.
All in all, this means that, for the time being at least, improving
the storage capacities of HDDs is the most attainable means of providing the
short-term solution needed until other high-capacity forms of data storage are
perfected.