Western Digital reimagines hard drives with OptiNAND

A new flash-enhanced drive architecture has been introduced at the just concluded HDD Reimagine event hosted by Western Digital.
The event centered on the availability, benefits, features, and performance, as well as growth opportunities for OptiNAND. This new storage architecture meshes traditional hard drives with flash storage capacity to deliver performance and increased areal density.

Western Digital is a global data storage brand that empowers you to create, experience, and preserve your digital content across a range of devices. Known for their innovation across Flash and Hard Disk Drive (HDD), the company seeks to close the gap for their customers in innovation and technology development.

“The hard drive has been and will remain into the future, the central medium of storage to help close the gap for our customers in the data explosion”, said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP and GM, HDD Business, Western Digital.

“We know that small incremental changes and improvements in technology are necessary but they are not sufficient and as we go forward, we’ve looked at a road map where we can deliver fundamental strides in technology development and innovation across the portfolios of both flash and in hard drives to deliver world-class storage out scale,” he added.

The OptiNAND technology doesn’t use flash storage to store user data, unlike a hybrid drive where flash is used to store user data. The new architecture is a breakthrough in storage that works differently, enabling advances on multiple dimensions of storage capability. By adding vertically integrated iNAND to its world-class HDDs, and with enhanced firmware algorithm and SoC innovations.

According to Siva Sivaram, president of Global Technology and Strategy, Western Digital, this technology is developed because the two technology development organisations work hand in hand.

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With the OptiNAND technology, there is improved capacity, performance, and reliability. The drive works smarter, with enhanced firmware algorithms taking advantage of expanded metadata that has been offloaded to the iNAND, enabling more tracks per inch (TPI) with resulting increased areal density.

This invention by Western Digital entails achieving one of the biggest synergies in the storage marketplace by being able to think both on the solid-state and rotating media storage and create technologies not just in the underlined pipelines of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASICs) and system on a chip (SOCs) but in products themselves.

The technology also improves drive latency with proprietary optimizations to drive firmware focused on requiring fewer adjacent track interference (ATI) refreshes and reducing the need for write cache flushes in write cache-enabled mode. Nearly 50 times more customer data can be retained in the event of emergency power off (EPO) scenario.

With Western Digital’s unique capabilities in vertically integrated supply, design, development, testing, and qualification of flash-enhanced drives, customers can count on the drive’s reliability.

The new flash-enhanced drive architecture with OptiNAND technology will be available across the company’s portfolio of drives and storage platforms. It will also serve as the foundation for future designs and innovations, with further advances to come in intelligence, reliability, capacity, and time-to-market value. The company will begin announcing market-specific, purpose-built products across its portfolio later this year.

Billy Chen, vice president of New H3C Group, president of Compute and Storage Product Line said, “This new architecture is a natural extension of Western Digital’s strengths and capabilities, delivering a new evolution of storage to the market. As an early customer, the OptiNAND technology is exciting as it will help us meet our storage needs for years to come.”