Seagate Technologies, Western Digital, and NGD Systems recently announced the launching of their latest products. These products include Seagate's Exos X16, Western Digital's Zoned Storage initiative, and NGD Systems' 8TB M.2 SSD.
Seagate's Exos X16
Seagate Technologies said it has started shipping its 16 TB helium-based enterprise drives. Exos X16 is part of the company's latest family of storage devices focusing on its retail market. At 7200 RPM, this 3.5" drive with SED (self-encrypting drive) options has the highest storage capacity (16TB) and highest rack-space efficiency.
The Exos X16 provides 33% additional storage per rack compared to the 12 TB variants, Seagate claims. This feature reduces the total cost of ownership for data center operators. Customers can also purchase Exos X series in both SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps versions.
Western Digital's Zoned Storage initiative
Western Digital also announced its open Zoned Storage initiative for hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). This new technology uses zone block management in creating a more efficient and disaggregated storage option. The company is eyeing to combine shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs with Zoned Name Spaces (ZNS) on NVMe SSDs.
SMR is a new HDD technology enabling tracks on a platter to be layered on top of each other. The layering process, which is similar to roof shingles on houses, will increase the platter density of drives. SMR HDDs also use zoning to allow the multi-step write process required to overwrite previously written tracks.
Western Digital said Zoned Storage is an open-source, standards-based initiative that will enable data centers to scale efficiently. This scalability is a requisite in the zettabyte storage capacity era. Zoned Storage includes the capability to store and retrieve data using SMR in HDDs to increase storage density.
The company said that it had demonstrated 20 TB SMR drives, which it expects to ship in 2020. It estimates that 50% of its shipped HDD exabytes will be on SMR by 2023.
NGD Systems' 8TB M.2 SSD
NGD Systems said it has recently launched its 8TB M.2 SSD for edge applications. This computational storage device is the company's first product in a small M.2 form factor for its Newport Platform. This product can store up to 8 TB that comes with an AI-ready processor.
The company's new product enables fresh ways to scale storage and processors for modern technologies, the company said. This product combines storage and processing, which is a requirement for edge computing, hyperscale, and open infrastructure environments.
