Western Digital UltraSMR HDDs now Available with 22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR

Controller Master


Building on significant technology innovations cultivated over decades, Western Digital today announced that it is sampling its new industry-leading 22 TB and 26 TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud customers, further expanding its areal density leadership and delivering customer value by driving TCO lower. Western Digital’s HDD technology portfolio and areal density leadership puts it at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies, Western Digital is on a clear path to delivering 30+ TB with ePMR.

“As a longstanding partner of the industry’s leading cloud providers, we understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud infrastructure and invested in several HDD innovations we developed alongside our areal density technology,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP and GM, HDD Business Unit, Western Digital. “Our intent with taking this development strategy was not only to address the capacity demands of the world’s largest cloud titans but to deliver on a roadmap that would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for decades to come. With ePMR, OptiNAND and now UltraSMR as the foundation of Western Digital’s HDD roadmap, our cloud customers can continue rapidly scaling their business by taking advantage of our innovations to lower their storage TCO.”

OptiNAND, UltraSMR and ePMR Drive Cloud TCO Lower
The new ePMR drives leverage Western Digital’s OptiNAND technology to unlock unprecedented levels of capacity, performance and data resiliency. The 22 TB CMR HDD incorporates OptiNAND to deliver areal-density leadership on a mature 2.2 TB/platter HelioSeal platform with ten disks.

Combining OptiNAND with proprietary firmware that leverages HDD system-level hardware advancements, Western Digital’s new UltraSMR technology introduces large block encoding along with an advanced error correction algorithm that increases tracks-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity. The result is Western Digital’s new 26 TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD that delivers 2.6 TB per platter, offering 18% more capacity for cloud customers optimizing their stacks to take advantage of the benefits of SMR. With cloud service providers increasingly adding SMR to their datacenter roadmaps, the 26 TB capacity serves as a tipping point to accelerate adoption.

Uniquely capable with OptiNAND, the HDDs also include the ArmorCache write cache data safety feature, which gives customers the performance of write cache enable (WCE) combined with the data protection of write cache disable (WCD) for added data protection or resiliency in case of an emergency power off (EPO). For the first time in HDD history, this Write Cache Data Safety feature gives users both performance and data protection, no matter which mode is selected. OptiNAND gives the drives a significant performance increase also in WCD mode, which is greatest in random writes with larger block transfers. At common HDD application transfer lengths of 256 KB or greater, IOPS and throughput improve by more than 40% relative to a non-OptiNAND drives, with a peak improvement of over 80% at 1 MB transfer length. See the tech brief here for more details.

22 TB CMR and 26 TB UltraSMR HDD Availability:

  • The 22 TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD and the new 26 TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD are now sampling to select hyperscale customers. The DC HC570 HDD will begin volume shipments to the channel, and the UltraSMR HDD will begin shipping to select customers in the summer of 2022.
  • The Ultrastar Data60and Data102JBODs will feature the new 22 TB CMR Ultrastar HDDs this summer, delivering the industry’s highest storage density in a fully optimized platform for added durability and data reliability for software-defined storage.
  • Extending OptiNAND innovations across its HDD portfolio, Western Digital will deliver 22 TB WD Purple Pro HDDs for smart video/surveillance, WD Red Pro HDDs for NAS solutions, and WD Gold HDDs for system integrators and resellers serving enterprises and SMBs. These drives will be available this summer.