Western Digital Releases 24TB Ultrastar and Gold Hard Drives, 28TB SMR Ramping

One of the comments got me intrigued, and wow:

"OptiNAND uses a large non-volatile memory on the drive. It optimizes write performance by using DRAM as a cache. So, when the drive is powered up, performance is on par with WCE, well it is WCE technically as DRAM caching is enabled.

In the event of an emergency power off (EPO), the contents of DRAM are written to non-volatile memory (NVM) using the power of the spinning disk, so the data is protected. Since NVM can hold the data for a very long time without needing power , as soon as the drive is powered up again , the data can be transferred from NVM to the drive."

https://pnpdxb.com/blogs/hdd-2/what-is-wd-armorcache-and-opt...

SMR was such a bad idea it was difficult to figure out how bad until it went into full production.

Now we know.

With a HDD there has always been an expectation of nominal performance when used as a boot/system drive for the current version of Windows at the time.

And that expectation has logically been for higher performace as technology improves, HDD's were a big jump up in both speed and capacity compared to floppies, followed by other stepwise improvements regularly seen over the years.

SSD's might have put HDD's to shame on speed some time ago, but nobody was expecting HDD's to reverse course after all these decades.

A few years ago before the "discovery" that SMR was the "secret" that allowed a significant stepwise increase in capacity (while concealing a more significant unprecedented decrease in random-access performance), I had the opportunity to deal with one of these on a nominal basis to install both Windows 10, then later Windows 11 for a user that expected the usual improvement in boot and access speed that further developments in HDD's had always resulted in up until that time. There had been a major project within Microsoft during Windows 8 development to drastically reduce boot time, and that accomplishment has not been nearly as badly compromised as it could have been by now in Windows 11.

The SMR performance disappointment continues.

Now that the dust has settled, it can be seen that on an almost 20-year-old PATA IDE 100GB HDD, Windows 11 boots approximately in 1/10 the time it takes on an 8TB WD SMR fast SATA HDD.

Most people dont get around to this kind of A/B testing, me neither but eventually the anecdata builds up to where it means more than a focused short-term comparison.

Then you compare them back-to-back and confirm your suspicions on a level playing field.

>All three models feature 10 platters

This is insane, yet it works. Reading the comments brings another gem:

"Say, for whatever reason, power is cut off during the write process on a large data batch. The System-on-a-Chip (SoC) of an OptiNAND drive — in under a second — will use the rotational power generated by the already spinning disks inside the drive to power internal capacitors until any cached data transfers to non-volatile NAND. Previously, without an iNAND component, that data would potentially be lost."

> The latest Ultrastar HDDs are generally being aimed at cloud service providers, hyperscalers, and large enterprises, whereas WD Gold are going primarily to VARs, enterprises, enterprise-grade NAS, and small businesses that need to store loads of data.

Are there any enthusiasts here that use this much space for any reason, for what? At this point if I had a reason, I would probably still build an NVMe array at great expense

How long is it going to take to run a single pass of badblocks against a 24 or a 28 TB drive? Weeks?