Very, very big hard drives (and SSDs too)

© Western Digital.

Yesterday, Western Digital introduced a slew of new products aimed at both consumer PCs and at large companies with storage-intensive servers. The headliners are two new ultra-large capacity hard drives, one 26TB and the other 22TB. The 26TB Ultrastar drive uses a technology called SMR (shingled magnetic recording) that increases the amount of data that can fit on each platter, though this comes at the cost of performance; while the 22TB drive uses CMR technology, increasing capacity while maintaining performance. These new discs should be available this summer, but only for “selected customers” to start with and at an undisclosed price. Fat chance you’ll see either of them sitting in your PC anytime soon.

As far as SSDs, Western Digital is coming out with UltraStar NVMe (PCIe 4.0) SSDs with a capacity of up to 15.36TB, which is quite impressive. The company also presented additions to its consumer line, including two new WD Black SSDs: the SN850X offered in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB from USD 190, and the P40 external SSD offered in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB from USD 120. Both will be available this summer.

⇨ Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham, “Western Digital announces 26TB hard drives and 15TB server SSDs.”

2022-05-10