Monday, January 30th 2023
Western Digital Launches the Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 20 TB Hard Drive
Western Digital has launched its first dual actuator hard drive, in the shape of the Ultrastar DC HS760 Hard Drive, which is currently only available in a single 20 TB SKU. This places WD's new drive head to head with Seagates Exos X20 drives, although Seagate offers an 18 and a 20 TB SKU. WD offers the Ultrastar DC HS760 with a SAS interface, whereas Seagate offers its Exos drives with either SATA or SAS connectivity. Both companies are using traditional CMR platters that spin at 7,200 RPM.
WD didn't provide too many details when it comes to the performance of the Ultrastar DC HS760, as the company only claims it offers twice the sequential throughput and 1.7 times higher random performance compared with the Ultrastar DC HC560. WD appears to have a potential performance advantage over Seagate, as WD has integrated its OptiNAND technology based on WD's iNAND, which means that the Ultrastar DC HS760 should have at least twice as much cache as Seagates Exos X20 drives which top out at 256 MB. This is based on WD's DC HC560 drives which ship with 512 MB of cache. Just like Seagates Exos drives, the Ultrastar DC HS760 is a helium filled drive and WD claims 2.5 million MTBF time and offers a five year warranty. No pricing was revealed.
Source:
Western Digital
WD didn't provide too many details when it comes to the performance of the Ultrastar DC HS760, as the company only claims it offers twice the sequential throughput and 1.7 times higher random performance compared with the Ultrastar DC HC560. WD appears to have a potential performance advantage over Seagate, as WD has integrated its OptiNAND technology based on WD's iNAND, which means that the Ultrastar DC HS760 should have at least twice as much cache as Seagates Exos X20 drives which top out at 256 MB. This is based on WD's DC HC560 drives which ship with 512 MB of cache. Just like Seagates Exos drives, the Ultrastar DC HS760 is a helium filled drive and WD claims 2.5 million MTBF time and offers a five year warranty. No pricing was revealed.
63 Comments on Western Digital Launches the Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 20 TB Hard Drive
I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?
Seagate 18TB Exos X18 = 300 USD
Micron 7450 PRO 15.36TB PCIe Gen4 1x4 NVMe = 1,750 USD
Intel DC P4510 SSDPE2KX080T801 2.5" U.2 8TB PCIe NVMe 3.1 x4 = 750 USD
Micron 9300 PRO Series MTFDHAL15T3TDP-1AT1ZABYY 2.5" U.2 15.36TB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 = 3,000 USD
Source: newegg.com
Yeah the prices for enterprise SSD's have a long way to go to catch up to spinning rust in terms of price efficiency per GB.
But it is positive that they still spend time to make them faster. All throw these drives are SAS interfaces only for now.
To be consumer friendly, we need a sata version. All throw these new drives will not be cheap by hdd standards.
Fast hdd is still needed. I have a fast hdd my self for fastest possible storage and data transfer in my own pc. WD gold enterprise-class hdd and a wd red pro. So not the slowest hdd. But they are far from out competing an ssd. These new dual actuator drives are closer to close the gab for sata ssd. Nvme far from.
I don’t need 1Gbps of read or wrote speed for transfers from a phone, camera, camcorder, or storage media they use. I do need about 10TB of storage that is reliable and redundant, while not costing an arm or kidney.
There's A BIT more physical engineering involved.
The sequential read can exceed SATA3 cable speed though, which is much more significant.
croit.io/blog/benchmarking-seagate-exos2x14-mach-2-hdds
Enterprise environments commonly have the extreme opposite high-uptime scenario, enterprise-grade HDDs are designed so their spindle doesn't give in and the actuator motors continue to be precise after years of continuous operation. SSDs eliminate this problem by their very nature, which makes that concern completely irrelevant.
A key argument is that HDDs have no practical limits to how much you can write and re-write to it, but my question is: Is it really relevant to your personal use case? I figure that even the most intense data hoarders usually write once and then read this data back many times over, for example, someone who has a vast collection of high-resolution movies.
This 12-year-old SSD from the height of the reliability FUD on forums has been on every build and device I've owned ever since I purchased it in 2011. It's been fully rewritten almost 150 times over, been used in a PS3, in a RAID array and had a page file installed on it for most of its service life, and it still retains 97% of its health:
Fine, this is a 2D MLC drive with backup capacitors and DRAM, basically bullet-proof compared to a low cost SSD today, but let's hypothesize: an "unreliable" QLC drive may be reprogrammed in its entirety only 50 times? OK, fine, but are you actually going to do that? I really wonder what are you storing... video games, music and video are usually the most intensive data sets in a computer, and they're invariably write once and read many (WORM) types of data.
Fact will remain that the HDDs indeed do have currently unmatched data density and their cost is significantly lower at the higher end of the per-device storage capacity, but for almost all use cases, I see SSDs effectively supplanting them entirely unless one must store dozens of terabytes of data at once, and even then these are, IMHO, best installed on a network-attached server instead of locally in the client computer.
I would argue that for all but the most massive data storage needs, HDDs are not only redundant: they've become obsolete.
It's a loss-loss for consumers from both sides...
There are at least a couple of manufacturers of 8 TiB SSD's now, Samsung is definitely one of those, they have the 8 TiB 870 QVO.
It was a SCSI based disk with twice the performance as with a disk with a single actuator, but had to be controlled by the SCSI controller itself rather then we see today. Basicly it was a 2 in 1 disk.
I think HDD manufactors where waiting too long and milking the idea of storage and it's wealthy position even before SSD was even available.
You'll see that in 10 years from now on HDD's become pretty much obsolete.
Wow, Conner Peripherals, I haven't heard of them in a long, long time. Was that an example of the tank style HDD (5.25")? I remember back then HDD's had external controllers that could only support a limited number of HDD's unless their firmware was updated, then some company that is long since out of business invented an HDD on a ISA card thus inventing the IDE HDD.