News Western Digital's 20TB HDDs with OptiNAND Are Available Now

[Admin]

Western Digital’s 20TB hard drives combine CMR with on-board NAND.

Western Digital's 20TB HDDs with OptiNAND Are Available Now : Read more

 

[Pirx73]

Price is about 150 less than 8TB SSD, so for those who need that much of capacity it is a good deal i think.

 

[USAFRet]

Price is about 150 less than 8TB SSD, so for those who need that much of capacity it is a good deal i think.

This seems to be just a larger version of the old SSHD concept.
meh...

The 20TB capacity, however...that IS cool.

 

[Mr5oh]

As someone who is using WD Gold drives in my Desktop / gaming machine, I'm hesitantant to have one with SSD memory. What happens to the drive if the flash memory fails?

 

[mikenth]

As someone who is using WD Gold drives in my Desktop / gaming machine, I'm hesitantant to have one with SSD memory. What happens to the drive if the flash memory fails?

It is far more likely that the moving parts of a mechanical hard drive will fail before the solid state parts of a hybrid drive. I worry about any mechanical HD failing, and haven't had a system relying on a lone HD for over ten years. Instead I RAID 1 or RAID 10 2-4 HDs for insurance against failure. I will use a separate single SSD or RAID 0 array for data I can afford to lose (like boot drive) where performance is more important than reliability. These days there is no excuse (cost, performance, reliability) to rely on a single mechanical HD for anything, just don't do it. There are faster or more reliable or both alternatives.

 

[PiranhaTech]

The flash might help a lot. A magnetic hard drive can actually spin really fast if you are transferring very large files. Also, if you are using SMR, you might be able to make the SMR overhead a lot less using algorithms.