Western Digital (WD) claims to have redesigned the hard disk drive (HDD) through the introduction of a new and improved flash drive architecture that breaks the traditional constraints of HDD storage. Called OptiNAND, its new architecture integrates an iNAND flash drive built into the main hard drive board. Although the company has not detailed the amount of NAND on board its OptiNAND drives, it insists that its predisposition is not a hybrid drive. “We have had an exceptional journey of hard drive innovation. We changed everything with HelioSeal in 2013; They were the first to ship power-assist hard drives in volume in 2019; and now we're going to lead again with OptiNAND technology,” observed Siva Sivaram, Western Digital's president of Global Strategy and Technology.
Here to stay
WD notes that OptiNAND drives are designed for the needs of service customers such as enterprises, NAS vendors, CCTV manufacturers, hyperscale cloud vendors and others with similar data storage requirements in mind. The company claims that, unlike hybrid drives, its new OptiNAND drives do not store any user data on the flash drive, which instead stores metadata, which helps improve the drive's capacity, performance, and reliability. . The first products with the new drive architecture will offer an incredible 9 Terabytes per platter and will be built using its Power Assisted Perpendicular Magnetized Recording (ePMR) technology. Interestingly, WD announced that OptiNAND is past the completion stage and that the company has already shipped samples of the XNUMX Terabyte XNUMX-drive OptiNAND drives to certain customers of the service. In addition to this, the company adds that it will adopt the OptiNAND platform for any and all hard drives larger than twenty Terabytes in the future. “This architecture will support our hard drive technology roadmap across multiple generations, as we predict that an ePMR hard drive with OptiNAND will reach XNUMX terabytes in the second half of the decade,” concludes Sivaram.