Tag: HDDs

30TB HAMR HDDs hit stores. Seagate has 36TB drives coming

HDDs, News | | Jan Olšan

The coming of HAMR hard drives was notorious for constantly being postponed. It’s amusing to think that back in 2012, we expected them to arrive within two years. But Seagate stuck with the tech and eventually brought it to actual deployment, officially announced last year. Fittingly, though, they still weren’t available to buy—until now. After years, you really can walk into a store and take home a HAMR HDD with tiny lasers inside. Read more “30TB HAMR HDDs hit stores. Seagate has 36TB drives coming” »

WD introduces Dual Actuator HDDs reaching SATA SSDs speeds

HDDs, News, Technology | | Jan Olšan

Hard drives are often considered obsolete or plain bad technology, but they still serve an important role when vast storage space is needed without breaking the bank. Fortunately, this technology is still continuing to evolve. We’ve seen HAMR from Seagate recently and now it’s Western Digital’s turn with a performance-enhancing innovation for a change. Performance is chief weakness of HDDs, but there are ways to improve it. Read more “WD introduces Dual Actuator HDDs reaching SATA SSDs speeds” »

First OptiNAND-based WD HDDs go on sale. 20 TB without SMR

HDDs, News, Technology | | Jan Olšan

HDD capacities have been rising slowly lately and new larger HDDs often take very long to ship after being announced. But it looks like we are finally getting somewhere: the first 20 TB capacity HDDs (without SMR) are coming, from Western Digital. They’re actually coming to the market with general availability. What’s more, they are interesting because they are the first drives with the recently introduced OptiNAND technology. Read more “First OptiNAND-based WD HDDs go on sale. 20 TB without SMR” »

OptiNAND: WD adds flash memory to HDDs, but not in the SSHD way

HDDs, News, Technology | | Jan Olšan

Lately (actually for several years now) we’ve seldom had news about hard disks. An opportunity to write about a new innovation in this area has come now though. Western Digital has introduced OptiNAND technology, which improves the performance of mechanical drives by integrating NAND Flash memory – but not in the way of SSHDs, which only used it for caching. OptiNAND serves other purposes, and it could be much more useful. Read more “OptiNAND: WD adds flash memory to HDDs, but not in the SSHD way” »