The announcement was made at the company’s HDD Reimagine event, with more details given in the accompanying press release. Western Digital stated that it strives to meet customer demand for large data storage. These customers are generally rather large-scale companies, such as communications providers, hyper-scale cloud companies, and NAS suppliers, all of which need some kind of solution to store the vast amounts of data they create. These hard drives use a storage architecture called OptiNAND that is integrated with an iNAND UFS flash drive for improved performance, reliability, and capacity. According to Western Digital, the HDD has such high storage capacity because enhanced firmware algorithms remove metadata from the disk storage space and put it into the iNAND flash drive. In the event of an emergency power-off scenario, the iNAND can retain much of the data stored on it, improving the reliability of the HDD. Western Digital states the high level of performance comes from low latency optimizations that require fewer interference refreshes. The official name of the 20TB hard drive has not been given. Samples of the new hard drive have been sent on to a select few companies for testing. According to the post, the market-specific products will be available later this year, but no exact date has been given.
