Western Digital introduced its first dual-drive mechanical hard drive (HDD) to compete with rival Seagate’s Exos line of hard drives.
In fact, mechanical hard drives are mainly electronic memory made up of three major components — drive motors, heads + drive arms and platters — while Seagate previously introduced innovative Multi-Actuator technology, which doubles the performance of HDDs.
Western Digital’s dual-drive HDD builds on the classic Ultrastar DC HC560, but doubles sequential read and write speeds and nearly doubles random performance for hyperscale cloud data centers.
Simply put, the two independent drives in this mechanical drive work in parallel, resulting in twice the sequential throughput (582 MB/s) of SATA SSDs and 1.7 times the random performance of single-drive HDDs (still not comparable to SSDs).
Western Digital claims that the drive saves up to 37 percent of power consumption over two separate hard drives, but Western Digital has not released detailed specifications for the product.
The Western Digital Ultrastar DC HS760 20TB dual-drive drive uses Western Digital’s third-generation OptiNAND platform with nine 2.2TB ePMR (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording technology) platters and NAND flash to act as a cache, thereby improving performance.
It is worth noting that the drive has a single SAS interface, but when onboard it appears as two 10TB logical unit number (LUN) SAS devices, so it also requires software tuning on the host side. As a result, not all data centers will be able to use this drive.
Like Western Digital’s other Ultrastar drives, the DC HS760 20TB also comes with a 5-year warranty for 24/7 operation and can handle up to 500TB of data per LUN per year, slightly less than the 550TB per year workload of competing products.
On the pricing side of things, Western Digital did not reveal its exact pricing because this is not a retail product, but it will certainly be more expensive than a single drive.
