DUBAI: Hard drive and data storage company Western Digital has announced that it is introducing OptiNAND – a novel architecture involving the integration of an embedded iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD) on the drive’s mainboard.
The company said the new digital architecture gives customers such as hyperscale cloud, CSPs, enterprises, smart video surveillance partners, NAS suppliers and others a solution to meet the demand for storing vast amounts of data.
“The first products featuring the new drive architecture will deliver an unsurpassed 2.2TB per platter, extending capacity gains on proven ePMR technology. Setting a new industry milestone, Western Digital has shipped samples of new nine-disk, 20TB ePMR flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology to select customers,” a statement issued by the company said.
Ed Burns, research director for hard disk drives at IDC, said, “Driven by the growth of AI, ML, blockchain, IoT, sensors and more, there’s no doubt that new storage innovations are needed to store and protect today’s data growth, especially at scale.”
It said the drive works smarter, with enhanced firmware algorithms taking advantage of expanded metadata that has been offloaded to the iNAND, enabling more tracks per inch (TPI) with resulting increased areal density.
Drive latency is improved with proprietary optimizations to drive firmware focused on requiring fewer adjacent track interference (ATI) refreshes and reducing the need for write cache flushes in write cache-enabled mode.
Nearly 50 times more customer data can be retained in the event of an emergency power off (EPO) scenario, the company said.
