Western Digital introduces first 22tb CMR hard drive

Western Digital announced its new shipping, industry-leading Ultrastar® DC HC570 22TB CMR HDDs in India. Leveraging its unique OptiNAND™, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), ArmorCache™ and HelioSeal® technologies, delivering enhanced value by driving a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for cloud service providers and enterprise customers.

On the leading edge of storage innovation, the Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD is rightly timed for the Indian market as the country is witnessing massive data growth and therefore data centre expansion. Additionally, with the recently concluded 5G spectrum auction, India is expecting the rollout of 5G services, which will further amplify data and cloud usage to create huge demand for high-capacity drives to reduce TCO.

Khalid Wani, Senior Director – Sales, India, Western Digital, said, “We are excited to introduce the world’s first 22TB CMR HDD in India. We are constantly working to help address the capacity demands of the industry, as well as support the evolving economics of data centres for decades to come.”

Jaganathan Chelliah, Senior Director – Marketing, India, Middle East & TIA, Western Digital, said, “We are living in the Zettabyte era today and creating a massive amount of data. Our newly introduced 22TB drives will help our customers to efficiently store and access huge volumes of data while offering cost efficiencies and low TCO at scale.”

The new 22TB CMR drive extends capacity gains on proven ePMR technology and leverages industry-first technologies to deliver areal-density leadership on a mature 2.2TB/platter with ten disks. One of the new technology innovations is ArmorCache, enabled by OptiNAND combines the performance of write cache enabled (WCE) mode and the data protection of write cache disabled (WCD) mode, offering the best of both scenarios without compromise.

When operating in WCE mode, ArmorCache ensures the DRAM cache is safely written in event of an emergency power off (EPO) and no data is lost. When operating in WCD mode, the drive ensures all user data in DRAM is safely written upon EPO, and the drive will operate with WCE-equivalent performance. Performance and data protection are now identical across both WCE and WCD modes.