WD Adds Helium-Filled 10 TB NAS HDDs to WD Red, WD Red Pro Lineups

Western Digital has announced two new helium-filled hard drives targeting consumer and business NAS applications. The new WD Red and WD Red Pro HDDs increase capacity of WD’s NAS drives to 10 TB, boost their performance and also reduce their power consumption. Therefore, the new drives enable makers of NAS units to increase capacities of their products to 80 TB (or 160TB) while increasing speeds and cutting down power.

After introducing its first hermetically sealed helium-filled NAS and video-surveillance HDDs with 8 TB capacity and six platters last year, Western Digital is refreshing its Red and Purple lineups with more advanced drives offering 10 TB capacity and using seven 1.42 TB platters. The new WD Red and WD Red Pro with 10 TB capacity are based on revamped 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM HelioSeal platforms that can support a higher number of platters. The drives also feature increased areal density and 256 MB of cache, enabling ~17% higher sequential read/write performance compared to its predecessors, as well as a lower power consumption compared to previous-gen helium WD Red hard drives. Other than that, Western Digital does not really disclose the feature set of its platform for helium-filled HDDs for NAS applications.

The WD Pro 10 TB drive is engineered for personal or small business NAS systems with up to eight bays, is optimized for mixed workloads and has a 5400 RPM spindle speed. By contrast, the WD Red Pro 10 TB is aimed at medium business and enterprise-class NAS systems up to 16 bays, which is why the HDD features additional protection against vibrations as well as improved random read performance due to both 7200 RPM spindle speed and firmware tuning.  Just like their predecessors, the new WD Red/WD Red Pro hard drives come with SATA 6 Gbps interface.

It is interesting to note that WD has improved the power consumption of the 10TB drives over the older 8TB drives. We are asking how exactly WD is doing that, as details were not given with the press release.

The 10TB WD Red and 10TB WD Red Pro are available in the U.S. from select retailers and distributors. The WD Red 10 TB is covered by a three-year warranty and has a price tag of $494. The more advanced WD Red Pro 10 TB features a five-year warranty and has a $533 MSRP.

Related Reading:

• Western Digital: Sales of Helium-Filled HDDs Accelerating, 15M Sold So Far
• Western Digital Starts Shipments of HGST Ultrastar He12 12 TB HDDs
• Western Digital Expands Purple Lineup with a 10 TB Helium-Filled HDD
• Western Digital Introduces Its First Helium-Filled HDDs for Consumer Applications

Seagate Ships 35th Millionth SMR HDD, Confirms HAMR-Based Drives in Late 2018

Seagate last week made two rather important announcements regarding its current and upcoming hard drives. First, the company said that it had shipped 35 million HDDs based on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. Second, the manufacturer confirmed plans to launch commercial hard drives based on its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology by the end of 2018, the first time the company set a precise launch timeframe for such HDDs.

35 Million and Counting

Seagate launched the Archive 8 TB, its first HDD based on SMR, in 2013. Due to the technology, it targeted archive applications – the majority of the archival workload is sequential writes, and the data is hardly ever updated, concealing peculiarities of shingled magnetic recording. As reported multiple times, to increase areal density, HDDs featuring SMR write new magnetic tracks that overlap part of the previously written tracks. This may slow down the rewriting process since the architecture requires hard drives to rewrite adjacent tracks after any writing action. To mitigate such peculiarities, Seagate incorporated various features into its device-managed SMR-based drives, which were described by Mark Re (CTO of Seagate) in an interview last year. Over the course of the recent years, Seagate has introduced several generations of SMR-based drives for archive, NAS, surveillance and mobile PC applications. Each generation refined the use of shingled magnetic recording technology in a bid to improve performance (for example, Seagate added SLC NAND-based cache to its 2.5” SMR drives) as well as improving areal density.

During a recent call with investors and financial analysts, Stephen Luczo, CEO of Seagate, said that the company had shipped 35 million SMR-based hard drives and was about to launch its fourth generation of SMR-based HDDs. The head of the company did not elaborate on the benefits of the fourth-gen SMR, but Seagate has indicated that its platform is expandable for performance and areal density benefits. In fact, we already know from Western Digital’s announcement of a 14 TB HDD that the upcoming new-gen 3.5” SMR platters have a capacity of 1.75 TB per platter, so we expect Seagate to deal with disks of around the same areal density/capacity.

“We are successfully refreshing a number of products in our portfolio, utilizing our fourth generation SMR technology,” said Mr. Luczo. “To-date, we have sold over 35 million HDDs into the nearline client and consumer markets with this technology.”

What is noteworthy is that shipments of SMR-based drives are accelerating as Seagate expands use of the technology. Seagate shipped around four million of SMR HDDs in the first two years (from September 2013 to September 2015) and then shipments of SMR HDDs have comparatively skyrocketed over the past six quarters.

The main reason why Seagate has managed to accelerate sales of its SMR drives significantly in a short period of time is because such HDDs are contained and managed in isolation, but also because they are drop-in compatible with existing data center and client infrastructure where these drives make sense the most. That being said, we suspect that certain large customers of Seagate still adjust their software before deploying such drives, eliminating unnecessary writes and thus optimizing performance and power consumption by another step from regular testing. To put Seagate’s position into context, SMR-based HDDs from HGST are managed by hosts, which requires tangible investments from their customers. Even though the Ultrastar Ha-series is strictly aimed at clients who primarily appreciate raw capacities and relatively low power consumption (a feature of helium-filled HDDs), the integration issue is not such a big problem for Western Digital as the company still ships many high-margin products. Still, device-managed SMR expertise helps Seagate to address certain market segments with products that have no direct rivals. For example, the Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB HDD and the Seagate FireCuda 2 TB hybrid HDD have no direct competitors in the 2.5”/7mm segment.

One of Seagate’s targets going forward is to make products that do not compete against SSDs directly:

“By this time next year, we anticipate less than 10% of our HDD technology portfolio will be exposed to competing flash devices,” said Mr. Luczo.

HAMR-Based HDDs Due in Late 2018

While it is inevitable that client HDDs will continue to compete with client SSDs, high-end special-purpose drives are going to complement what is available with NAND flash. High-capacity HDDs based on HAMR technology are not going to have direct flash-based rivals of the same price and capacity, therefore, it is important for Seagate to launch such drives sooner rather than later. During the conference call, Seagate indicated that HAMR-based HDDs are set to be released commercially in late calendar 2018.

“From an R&D technology perspective, we continue to invest in our next-generation areal density HAMR technology,” said Mr. Luczo. “With products on the roadmap for the late 2018 calendar year, we believe we are leading the market in developing and bringing to market this important cost-benefit solution for mass storage capacity needs.”

This is not the first time that Seagate has made a HAMR-related announcement, but this is the first time when the company has set a particular launch timeframe for such drives. Previously, Seagate has implied that the first HAMR-based HDDs would feature a capacity of 16 TB, which is a significant increase from 12 TB hard drives due to be released in the coming weeks. Given the fact that data centers cry out for high-capacity drives, it is inevitable that HAMR-based HDDs with increased performance and higher capacities will be in high demand. Keeping in mind that late 2018 (by “late” companies usually mean the fourth quarter) is over a year away, Seagate is not sharing details about experimental deployments of HAMR-based HDDs that may be planned for 2017/early 2018.

Related Reading:

• Seagate Announces Enterprise Capacity 12 TB HDD: 2nd-Gen Helium-Filled Hard Drives
• Seagate Confirms Plans for 12 TB HDD in Near Future, 16 TB HDD Due in 2018
• Western Digital Expands Purple Lineup with a 10 TB Helium-Filled HDD
• Western Digital Announces Ultrastar He12 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs
• Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants
• Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity

Western Digital Starts Shipments of HGST Ultrastar He12 12 TB HDDs

Western Digital on Wednesday announced that it had begun to ship its HGST Ultrastar He12 hard drives with 12 TB of capacity. The HDDs are the first drives to employ eight platters, so the fact that Western Digital is now shipping them is important not…