Western Digital unveils a 22TB data centre hard drive

Western Digital, the US-based global storage company, has launched a new 22TB hard drive in India. The latter is not exactly open for general customers, and are targeted towards data centre use cases. The drive uses the conventional magnetic recording (CMR) architecture of hard drive data storage, which offers lesser data intensity than shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives — but is more stable and less prone to risks.

The hard drive comes months after it was unveiled in global markets — where interestingly, the enterprise grade drive is available for retail purchases as well. Globally, the 22TB CMR drive are available in three variants — for data centres, network-attached storage (NAS) devices for small-scale data backup and storage tasks, and for surveillance services used in various office settings.

According to WD, the 22TB drive helps improve data density in storage devices including in data centre applications. While SMR drives offer greater data density and are the ones that typically power high capacity, compact drives for consumers, CMR drives are more stable — which clearly offers a use case benefit for enterprise tasks. With higher data capacity in the 3.5" hard drive form factor, the drive can increase the amount of storage you can have in your small venture NAS setup.

The product comes as the Indian data centre market is poised to grow sharply over the immediate future. On August 4, a report on the local data centre market by industry body Assocham and consultancy firm EY India said that the local data centre market, which was valued at around $4.4 billion in 2020, is set to grow to $8 billion in 2026 — close to double within the next four years.

Several data centre operators, which include global players such as Cisco and NTT, as well as India's Hiranandani Group's Yotta Infrastructure, have been setting up data centre operations in the country — as the national data capacity builds up with more ventures migrating digitally.