I attended the Storage Field Day at Western Digital on February 28, 2019. WD gave us an awesome taste of their approach and plans for digital garages and memory. The organization discussed stable country and tough pressure merchandise in addition to their foray into the garage machine. Speakers stated that Western Digital might be 50 years old this year. Some thoughts from that meeting are summarized below, along with some pictures of the presentations.
WD’s audio system said that about 75% of the arena’s information is generated outside data centers, and more than 36% of the world’s data resides on their merchandise. The corporation is shipping its 4th era of BiCS technology (96-layer) with Toshiba Memory Corp (the NAND layer string comprises two 48-layer stacks). In the 2019 ISSCC, the two companies announced a 1.33 Tb 128-layer NAND flash chip. Corporations use charge trap technology to store electrical prices that create memories. Their layout’s cylindrical confinement allows the storage of three bits in keeping with a cell (see discern beneath). They commented that using the stop of 2019, three-D NAND would be the most shipped semiconductor device of all time.
Western Digital showed a chart indicating how exclusive NAND era nodes scale in value through the years due to production adulthood, as shown below. Their chart indicates that for them, 96-layer is becoming the maximum value-powerful reminiscence era in 2019.
In addition to its conventional fee track 3-D NAND, Western Digital is also making to be had a Low Latency Flash (LLF) tool to offer performance intermediate among traditional reminiscence of flash and DRAM (probably like Samsung) if you want to provide better overall performance and higher persistence (although greater highly-priced) flash reminiscence opportunity to Intel’s 3D-XPoint (Optane) era. The parent beneath compares DRAM, LLF NAND, conventional 3-D-NAND, and HDD to get admission to times versus Die Costs. The business enterprise made projections for information middle (center) storage versus other HDD garage applications on the HDD facet, as shown below. The slide shows the finest growth in the middle (information middle) HDDs going forward, and through 2020, it will dominate HDD shipments. They show TDMR (a version of shingled HDD) with the aid of 2018 and energy-assisted magnetic recording drives with sixteen-18 TB potential in 2019. It turned exciting that even though they still say microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) drives could be delivered in 2019, the emphasis is that the enterprise continues to be running on warmth-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) generation.
WD also said that they would show a twin actuator HDD at the Open Compute Project Summit in March 2019 (note that Seagate has said it will deliver a dual actuator HDD for records center programs in 2019). Their overall WD HDD shipment projections display the finest capability shipment increase in shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs compared to standard magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs out to 2023, with a slow decline in what they are calling low-ability drives. I am guessing that the SMR drives proven on this projection are frequently used for data facilities.
As proven below, Western Digital sees a near-term alternative of 15K and 10K corporation performance drives by the 2020s. However, they know the retention of a 10:1 benefit on $/TB HDD charges out to 2022 for better capacity 7200 RPM HDDs.
On the garage system aspect, WD is imparting a wide variety of all-flash and hybrid garage systems. WD showed projections for the information middle garage to move from SATA and SAS to NVMe products over the next few years.
Western Digital took a while to talk about the future of decomposable storage, which uses NVMe over the material (generally Ethernet because of the cloth) and could consist of storage and reminiscence on the same material in the long run as computation. A preceding weblog cited that WD’s OpenFlex platform includes an HDD garage container with NVMe connections at the back ends, bringing the HDD garage into the NVMe global.
They also mentioned the future of technologies, including computational garage (with garage accelerators internal to personal storage gadgets to free up vital processors) and in-memory computing with technology consisting of Gen-Z.
The Western Digital Storage Field Day meeting furnished insights into the critical developments anticipated for digital storage, reminiscence, and universal computer architectures as we move into the 2020s.
