SMR
Have Data Centers Reached the SMR HDD Tipping Point?
Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) hard drives (HDDs) have quietly existed for nearly a decade. Yet, as with many innovations, their journey to widespread acceptance has been gradual. SMR HDDs have seemingly only tiptoed into the data center. Now, something has changed. Western Digital CEO, David Goeckeler, recently shared that the company’s 26 terabyte (TB) UltraSMR […]
November 21, 2023 • 9 min read Technology
Explained: HDD Areal Density
Have you ever wondered how hard drives manage to store vast amounts of data in such a small space? In part, this is made possible by areal density—the driving factor in HDD capacity. This is areal density, explained. What is areal density? Areal density is the amount of data that can be stored per square […]
October 10, 2023 • 3 min read Technology
How UltraSMR Makes the Industry’s Highest Capacity Drives
Last May, Western Digital introduced its 26TB hard drive, the industry’s highest capacity drive available. It allows cloud-scale customers to achieve the ginormous capacities required for today’s massive data storage needs. The storage leader’s unceasing capacity gains are made possible by integrating multiple technology innovations. One such compilation is UltraSMR, which helped bring the 26TB […]
January 4, 2023 • 9 min read Technology
Three Technologies that Make HDD Magic
More bits, more tracks, more disks — this is how we made magic with our new 18TB and 20TB HDDs.
July 8, 2020 • 6 min read Data
Zonefs File-System Will Land with Linux® 5.6
A monumental milestone, because landing a new file system in the kernel is one of the hardest things to do in Linux and it opens up a whole new world for developers who want to take advantage of zoned devices.
February 24, 2020 • 6 min read Data
Entering the Zettabyte Age the “Write” Way
At Flash Memory Summit 2019, Dr. Siva Sivaram, president of technology and strategy, and Chris Bergey, senior vice president of devices, spoke about the biggest challenges we face amid exponential data growth and the foundational technologies needed to help organizations contend with the demands of the zettabyte age.
August 21, 2019 • 8 min read People
One Year Later… Dropbox Continues to Innovate with Western Digital
As new large-scale applications are developed, we have been working closely with our customers to optimize our storage device behavior to align more closely to application requirements.
July 30, 2019 • 8 min read Data
What is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative?
Zoned Storage is a new paradigm in storage motivated by the incredible explosion of data. This blog looks at what it is, how it's being adopted, SMR HDDs and Zoned Namespaces SSDs use cases, and the Zoned Storage Initiative.
June 14, 2019 • 8 min read Data
Enabling the Zettabyte Age
An ecosystem of hardware and software developers progress into the zettabyte age and drive the innovation needed for next generation data infrastructure.
June 11, 2019 • 6 min read Data
From Petabytes to Zettabytes — Get Serious about Ceph Storage Scalability at Cephalocon
Cephalocon 2019 is taking place next week in Barcelona, and we have several exciting technology developments to share that are particularly relevant for Ceph administrators managing multi-petabytes to hundreds of petabytes of storage.
May 16, 2019 • 3 min read Data