Western Digital is launching two new mass storage hard drives. A first drive with a capacity of 24 TB uses CMR technology. The second copy uses the slightly slower SMR technology, but has a capacity of 28 TB.

Western Digital is launching two new hard drives aimed at data center storage. With the new HDDs, the manufacturer is responding to the growing demand for higher density: the server world is looking for more and more terabytes in ever smaller areas.

CMR and SMR

The first new hard drive is the Ultrastar DC HC580. It has a capacity of 24TB and works over conventional magnetic recording or CMR. CMR is the standard hard drive technology that writes data directly to the hard drive. Compared to the 22TB version of the drive, the drives use twelve percent less energy per terabyte.

If it could be even more, WD introduces the Ultrastar DC HC680. This 28TB drive swaps CMR for SMR or Shingle-shaped magnetic mount. This technology ensures that write zones on a hard drive partially overlap. Think about the roof tiles, where each row of tiles contains a series of data. Writing directly to an SMR drive is not possible. The driveway is divided into zones where all tiles from the roof must be removed to replace one row. In order to write new data, old data must also be rewritten. SMR offers higher density, but at the expense of performance. Finally, the data is first moved to a CMR cache and then actually written away by the controller.

This drive is therefore mainly used for sequential read and write tasks that involve writing large amounts of data. Western Digital refers, among other things, to mass storage, backups and archiving. The drives are record holders: you can no longer find drives with a capacity of over 28 TB. The competitor Seagate’s portfolio currently tops out at 24 TB.

Finally, Western Digital announces that its WD Gold series now includes a 24TB CMR drive. The announcement comes at a turbulent time for Western Digital, which is currently in the process of spinning off its flash business.