Western Digital begins shipping new 22TB HDDs

Western Digital has started shipping its first 22TB HDDs based on cmr. The company comes with three different variants, each intended for different purposes. The manufacturer does not yet share recommended prices.

Western Digital introduces three different new 22TB HDDs, all of which use conventional perpendicular magnetic recording, or cmr. The 7200rpm drives will all come in 3.5″ format, a SATA connection, 512MB cache and a five-year warranty. The HDDs will be introduced in the WD Red Pro, Purple Pro and Gold series.

The 22TB WD Red Pro HDD according to Western Digital, is intended for NAS systems with up to 24 bays and according to the manufacturer are suitable for continuous use. The hdd has 512MB cache and OptiNAND, which uses nand memory to store metadata. That should improve the data density of HDDs. According to Western Digital, the WD Red Pro 22TB gets a MTBF of one million hours and gets a rated workload of 300TB per year. The drive must provide sustained throughput speeds of 265MB/s.

The WD Gold variant with 22TB storage capacity is intended for enterprise purposes and therefore has a higher reliability. According to the manufacturer, these WD Gold drives achieve an MTBF of 2.5 million hours and a higher rated workload of 550TB per year. This HDD also gets OptiNAND. This drive offers sustained throughput speeds of 291MB/s, according to Western Digital.

The WD Purple Pro 22TB is also intended for storing surveillance camera footage, and according to the manufacturer, up to 64 single-stream HD cameras can write simultaneously to the Purple Pro drives. This HDD also gets OptiNAND, an MTBF of 2.5 million hours, a rated workload of 550TB per year and throughput speeds of 265MB/s.

In May, Western Digital already announced its first 22TB HDDs. The company then showed, among other things, Ultrastar HDDs for use in data centers. The company also said that 22TB variants of the Purple Pro, Red Pro and Gold would be released in the summer, but did not mention a concrete date when the drives would be released.

Seagate started shipping its first 22TB HDDs in January, although those were SMR drives. Unlike cmr, data tracks on the HDD platters are partly superimposed with shingled magnetic recording. That allows for higher storage capacities, although it can adversely affect random read and write speeds.