>All three models feature 10 platters

This is insane, yet it works. Reading the comments brings another gem:

"Say, for whatever reason, power is cut off during the write process on a large data batch. The System-on-a-Chip (SoC) of an OptiNAND drive — in under a second — will use the rotational power generated by the already spinning disks inside the drive to power internal capacitors until any cached data transfers to non-volatile NAND. Previously, without an iNAND component, that data would potentially be lost."

10 platters isn't anything too extreme.

I remember some 5.25-inch full-height[1] SCSI drives from the 1990s had lots of platters. The Seagate ST410800 had 14 platters and 27 heads[2].

According to Wikipedia[3], the IBM 350 was the first disk drive, and it had 52 platters!

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[1] i.e. twice the height of a "regular" 5.25-inch drive bay in a PC case, which is actually half height.

[2] See p. 14 of the spec sheet (https://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/iguides/scs...) and a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LhneJ2u8WQ) which says 13 in the description but shows 14 in the video.

[3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d... . But if you follow their link to IBM's info (https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350...), IBM says 50, not 52. I guess it's hard to count hard disk platters?

Using the discs as a flywheel. Amazing.

One of the comments got me intrigued, and wow:

"OptiNAND uses a large non-volatile memory on the drive. It optimizes write performance by using DRAM as a cache. So, when the drive is powered up, performance is on par with WCE, well it is WCE technically as DRAM caching is enabled.

In the event of an emergency power off (EPO), the contents of DRAM are written to non-volatile memory (NVM) using the power of the spinning disk, so the data is protected. Since NVM can hold the data for a very long time without needing power , as soon as the drive is powered up again , the data can be transferred from NVM to the drive."

https://pnpdxb.com/blogs/hdd-2/what-is-wd-armorcache-and-opt...

Interesting. Is this the first enterprise grade HDD that uses NVM flash as a journal?

How long is it going to take to run a single pass of badblocks against a 24 or a 28 TB drive? Weeks?

How useful is that these days? Serious question.

That used to be a good way to test a drive / burn in, but that hasn't been all that practical for a while.

I at least still run it on new drives to verify it wasn't bricked in shipping and to get any early breakdowns out of the way before I try to rebuild my RAID around it. But it is extremely fucking slow to run already on 12 TB drives.

3-4 days.

I feel like 12 TB drives already take more than four days. Haven't done one in a while though.

12TB drives took me ~50 hours; linear extrapolation would say ~100 hours.

But the new drives have higher areal density and are a tad faster...

> The latest Ultrastar HDDs are generally being aimed at cloud service providers, hyperscalers, and large enterprises, whereas WD Gold are going primarily to VARs, enterprises, enterprise-grade NAS, and small businesses that need to store loads of data.

Are there any enthusiasts here that use this much space for any reason, for what? At this point if I had a reason, I would probably still build an NVMe array at great expense

Usually the answer is large catalogs of high definition series and movies.

Tools exist to automate this so not hard to accumulate TBs

> Are there any enthusiasts here that use this much space for any reason, for what?

Right now my NAS is 2x12TB disks in RAID-1. It's full and I'm constantly under space pressure; primary usage is the on-site backups for 3 kid computers + 2 computers each for my wife and me.

I separately have about 5TB of virtual machines, plus a few other terabytes of miscellaneous data.

Consolidating most of this with enough headroom that I don't need to worry about storage too much is appealing. Currently thinking tiered storage, with 3x24TB drives in a RAID-10 for 36TB of capacity plus a mirror of 2x2TB SSD in front of it (so ~3% cached plus really good write performance) is appealing.

I've got 4x18T of RAID5 (~52-odd TB) and hoping there's an upcoming BF sale on 20+T drives (the sweet spot being < $15/TB) as I'm running out of room.

storing what?

If you're consultant ish and keep all your old projects, maybe. Personaly I don't have 24 Tb of archives but I have old VMs worth like 5 Tb. I don't need them on NVMe, if i need to ressurect one I'll copy it to fast storage.

Media libraries are the obvious use case though. If you're into that.

SMR was such a bad idea it was difficult to figure out how bad until it went into full production.

Now we know.

With a HDD there has always been an expectation of nominal performance when used as a boot/system drive for the current version of Windows at the time.

And that expectation has logically been for higher performace as technology improves, HDD's were a big jump up in both speed and capacity compared to floppies, followed by other stepwise improvements regularly seen over the years.

SSD's might have put HDD's to shame on speed some time ago, but nobody was expecting HDD's to reverse course after all these decades.

A few years ago before the "discovery" that SMR was the "secret" that allowed a significant stepwise increase in capacity (while concealing a more significant unprecedented decrease in random-access performance), I had the opportunity to deal with one of these on a nominal basis to install both Windows 10, then later Windows 11 for a user that expected the usual improvement in boot and access speed that further developments in HDD's had always resulted in up until that time. There had been a major project within Microsoft during Windows 8 development to drastically reduce boot time, and that accomplishment has not been nearly as badly compromised as it could have been by now in Windows 11.

The SMR performance disappointment continues.

Now that the dust has settled, it can be seen that on an almost 20-year-old PATA IDE 100GB HDD, Windows 11 boots approximately in 1/10 the time it takes on an 8TB WD SMR fast SATA HDD.

Most people dont get around to this kind of A/B testing, me neither but eventually the anecdata builds up to where it means more than a focused short-term comparison.

Then you compare them back-to-back and confirm your suspicions on a level playing field.