Western Digital Plots to Squeeze Tape Market with Massive Archive Hard Drives


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Western Digital could prepare to conquer the tape archive market using HDD technology as the company seeks to resolve the archive problem.

Like reported through Block & Files who spoke with Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, executive vice president and general manager of the company’s hard drive business, companies in the storage industry are considering adding another layer of storage that will allow for cooler data and archive data to coexist.

Typically, businesses have relied on tape storage to store large amounts of data in the cheapest way possible. However, a new type of hard drive with more platters could present an attractive alternative to tape storage because it will allow data recovery more quickly.

Since Gorakhpurwalla spoke openly with Block & Files Regarding Western Digital’s archival data disc drive concept, it is likely that Western Digital and its customers have already started discussing the idea.

11-tray hard drives

In a memory-to-band hierarchical diagram, CPU and DRAM caches have the highest cost with the lowest latency, followed by storage-class memory, SSDs, proximity hard drives, and then tape while low. Archival hard drives, however, can be very useful for corporate data that needs to be saved but does not need to be read often, if at all.

Gorakhpurwalla explained to Block & Files that one of the ways that Western Digital and others in the storage industry could create massive archive hard drives is to increase the number of platters that make up a disc drive, stating:

“Think of a hard drive in the traditional sense, you know, the three and a half inch form factor with 9 or 10 platters. [and] in the future 11 trays and … the [kind of] pile of head that we have today. It’s a… combination of technology and capability. Using… this toolkit and then being able to deliver a solution for different levels of the data center… is part of our roadmap at Western Digital.

By adding an additional tray, Western Digital could achieve over 2TB increase in disk capacity, which would help when archiving large amounts of data. While the company doesn’t plan to launch 11-platter hard drives anytime soon, the idea is part of its roadmap for the future.

We have also rounded the best NAS drives, best high capacity drives and best external hard drives

Going through Block & Files

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