WD (Western Digital) is launching a massive hard drive this month that will be perfect for those hosting their own media servers. Oh, the joy of ripping everything you buy and making it available to you anywhere on Earth. It is the new WD 20TB OptiNAND HDD, which is a lot of capacity for a single drive.
It’s more than your normal drive though. What makes this HDD special is it hosts an iNAND UFS (universal flash storage) EFD (embedded flash drive) that caches metadata. For all of those not-so-fond-of-acronyms-and-fancy-words, this is a sub-storage that is used to cache things that allow the drive to perform better. For those looking for a more technical breakdown of everything, you can read up on it here.
This is one of the many new approaches to building better HDDs that can keep up with the ever-growing amount of data that exists out there. From web servers to gaming consoles, files aren’t always so small and compressed anymore. Instead, requiring vast amounts of space to store it all.
You likely won’t be getting your hands on one anytime soon though (or at all). These drives are designed for enterprise, thus you will find entities like data centers buying these up and not so much consumer users. Eventually, you will find them available somewhere, but I’m sure the price will be a bit much for the average person.
Don’t feel too bad though as there are plenty of options out there that allows you to come close. Like the WD 18TB Elements External HDD (currently $339) or the WD 18TB Gold Enterprise-Class Internal HDD (currently $485). The external option, looking kind of tempting, and you should be able to shuck the drive out of the case and use it internally if you don’t want external.
The fancy new OptiNAND drive will launch into the enterprise market sometime this month for an undetermined MSRP.
