WD Reveal the Ultrastar DC HS760 Dual Actuator 20TB Hard Drive

Posted on 31 Jan 2023 📧 Subscribe
Contents hide
1 The WD Dual Actuator Ultrastar HS760 20TB HDD Revealed
2 What is Dual Actuator Technology and Why is it a Big Deal?
3 How are the WD Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 and Seagate EXOS Mach.2 Drives Different?
4 Are Dual Actuator HDDs Better or Worse than 10K or 15K RPM HDDs in Speed or Storage?
5 When will the WD Ultrastar DC HS760 HDD Be Available?
6 Need Advice on Data Storage from an Expert?

The WD Dual Actuator Ultrastar HS760 20TB HDD Revealed

When it comes to storing large amounts of data in a data center or even a single large-scale server rack array, having larger capacity hard drives is essential to achieve better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). However, with many applications requiring access to frequently used warm data, traditionally more affordable but slower mechanical HDDs have begun to present a bottleneck – with many highlighting the glass-ceiling performance of traditional single actuator (the arm that reads the platters) drives starting to become the end of the road! Although WD is not the first to discuss and research into confronting this bottleneck (more on that later), the newly revealed Ultrastar DC HS760 is Western Digital’s solution to this issue, delivering high performance and high capacity for demanding data center applications, whilst maintaining the things that have made the Ultrastar series a continued popular choice in data centers worldwide. But what exactly is a dual actuator HDD? Why does that subject sound so familiar? And is this a new kind of HDD technology (alongside EAMR and MAMR) that you need to keep an eye on? Let’s discuss.

Key Hardware Highlights

Capacity: 20 TB (2x 10TB Volumes)
Interface: SAS
Recording Technology: CMR
Platter Spin Speed: 7200rpm
Platter Count: 9x 2.2TB
Form Factor: 3.5 Inch
Dimensions (L x W x H): 147.07mm x 101.6mm x 26.16mm
Workload: 550TB Annual
MTBF: 2.5Million Hours
Other Features:  OptiNAND, Healium Sealing, ArmorCache

What is Dual Actuator Technology and Why is it a Big Deal?

Dual actuator hard drives are a type of hard drive that utilizes two independent actuators to read and write data. An actuator is a device that moves the read/write heads of a hard drive in order to access data stored on the disk platters. In a dual-actuator hard drive, two independent actuators are used to move the read/write heads, allowing for faster access times and improved performance. For example, technically, a 16TB Dual Actuator equipped HDD is actually two 8TB HDDs that are inside the same HDD casing space, sealed by helium to ensure that thinner platters can be used, significantly reducing friction/drag potential.

The Prototype of the dual-actuator Western Digital Disk, which was first revealed at the March 2019 Open Compute Project Summit Event.

The two actuators are connected to separate motors, which can be independently controlled by the hard drive’s controller. This allows for more precise control over the movement of the read/write heads, resulting in faster access times and improved performance. The Ultrastar DC HS760 is a 20TB dual actuator CMR HDD that leverages Western Digital’s 2.2TB/disk density platters (as seen in their recent 20TB and 22TB releases in WD Red, WD Gold and Ultrastar). The two independent actuators that can simultaneously read or write data, providing up to twice the sequential performance. With each 10TB LUN appearing as an independent storage volume, the host application can manage file placement between the two volumes, improving access density (IOPS/TB). The benefits of a dual actuator include up to 2x sequential throughput, up to 1.7x random performance, and up to 37% more power efficiency. WD Are still yet to confirm the precise performance stats (and these percentage improvements come directly from their own product pages) but given the higher-end nature of their end-user base, the SAS interface on these drives (which might open up in future generations to SATA) and implementation of other elements of the Ultrastar DC drive series technology (eg OptiNAND), then I would not really doubt their commitment to these numbers. But, haven’t we heard about dual actuators in HDDs before?

How are the WD Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 and Seagate EXOS Mach.2 Drives Different?

We somewhat need to address the dual actuator-equipped elephant in the room! Back in 2019/2020, Seagate made quite a splash when they revealed their EXOS Mach.2 series of HDDs. These eventually rolled out commercially in 2021 in 14TB and 16TB versions, the Exos 2X14 consisted of two 7TB hard drives housed in a single hermetically sealed, helium-filled 3.5-inch chassis. It had a 7200 RPM platter speed, a 256MB multisegmented cache, and a single-port SAS 12Gb/s interface. The host system viewed the Exos 2X14 and 2X16 as two separate and independently addressable drives when connected. In full utility, it boasted 524MB/s sustained transfer rate. Originally designed to challenge the difficulty of choosing between cheap-large-slow HDDs or expensive-small-fast SSDs at the data center level. Fast forward to 2023 and we now have additional 16TB and 18TB Seagate EXOS Mach2 drives, in the 2X16 and 2X18 respectively. So what sets the Western Digital DC HS760 HDDs apart from these Seagate Mach.2 Drives?

Although both drives are designed for the enterprise market (so 55TB Workloads and 2.5M hours MTBF is quite standard and comparable with their single actuator counterparts), the WD drive also includes OptiNAND (Something we discussed HERE in our WD Red Pro 22TB Review last year). OptiNAND Technology The Ultrastar DC HS760 utilizes Western Digital’s proven OptiNAND technology, which integrates an iNAND Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Embedded Flash Drive (EFD) with traditional spinning disk media. This allows the drive to have better performance and data protection compared to traditional drives. Additionally, the WD Ultrastar DC HS760 also arrives with ArmorCache, a feature enabled by OptiNAND, which offers the best of both write cache enabled (WCE) and write cache disabled (WCD) modes. In the event of an EPO, the DRAM cache will be safely written in either mode, ensuring data protection and comparable performance across both WCE and WCD modes. Until Western Digital release further information on these new drives (official data sheets and/or live demonstrations) we will have to wait a little longer for more information on the abilities of these new high-performance SAS drives.

Are Dual Actuator HDDs Better or Worse than 10K or 15K RPM HDDs in Speed or Storage?

Dual Actuator HDDs aim to solve IOPS/TB constraints in systems that are currently using high-capacity 3.5-inch nearline HDDs, whereas 10K/15K mission-critical HDDs (such as the WD Velociraptor of the past) have much smaller capacities of around 2.4TB/900GB top capacities, respectively and are intended for servers. 10K and 15K hard drives differ from dual actuator hard drives in the way they access data on the disk platters. 10K and 15K hard drives use a single actuator to access the data on the disk platters, but do so up to twice as fast as dual actuator HDDs. However, dual actuator drives can handle more input/output operations per second, making them a good choice for demanding applications. There is the negligible benefit of Improved data integrity (i.e If one actuator fails, the other can still access the data on the disk platters, reducing the risk of data loss), but the main benefit/difference is that the dual arms allow a greater frequency of access in read and write overall. The popularity of 10K and 15K HDDs has dropped noticeably in recent years, thanks in part to the improvements NAND durability in SSD technology making them significantly more acceptable in warm/hot data archives – though they cannot hit the capacity of HDDs (NAND costs and physical PCB space), so dual Actuator HDDs are WD’s response to this growing disparity!

When will the WD Ultrastar DC HS760 HDD Be Available?

Although WD Ultrastar DC HS760 Hard Drives have been revealed, it is still very early! They have been listed on the company’s official store, but no price has been provided at this time (as well as no datasheet being made available at this time). Most likely, the first wave of units being made available will be extended to existing data centers (likely already well underway) and as this is a highly data-center class HDD, it will be surprising if this HDD is widely commercially available for a while yet! Watch this space and hopefully, we will get a chance to review this remarkably exciting HDD later in 2023 here on NASCompares.

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      75 thoughts on “WD Reveal the Ultrastar DC HS760 Dual Actuator 20TB Hard Drive”

      2. Your life will be better if you got your teeth fixed. I did it at age 44, best thing I have ever done. Two months of your youtube pay will cover the cost. You will speak better too.
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      6. Only problem is (with that calculation at the beginning), “22TB drive” is not actually 22 TB, but slightly more than 20 TB. While that would still fit your estimated 18 TB collection, you would not be left with 4 TB to spare.
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      7. I am thinking of building a small RAID of an array for video editing. Level 1 is possible, but what will happen if one part of the disk fails. In any case, I would wait for a product for raid 5 on one drive LOL
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      8. i think this is great im excited too especially for gaming, i know not everything works as well on hdd, but bieng able to horde games and use primocache with ssd as cache works extremely well, ive outgrown my ssds, and dont want qlc no thank you, so ill do tlc, ssds as a cache with massive hdds, and for backups, hopefully ill be able to replace my older firecudas with mach 2s or wds dual actuators, thatd be fun. always apretiate your videos man, the hdd is not dead, its still great tech, particularily if you have tons of data you want to use.
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      12. I’m confused..; i saw so many times that the max capacity for a single volume that consumer NAS and docking station is 16tb per volume… but here 22tb (x4!!!) seems to work just fine and people in the comments mention 18tb being the sweet spot… are NAS and docking station compatible with more than 16tb despite the infos that they are not, that can be found often?
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      13. I still want my fabled 12cm ‘1petabyte single optical disc’.. I’ll even take an 8cm ‘500 TB single optical disc’ … or perhaps go back to the caddied Mini-Disc with a ‘250 TB single optical disc’ capacity, even if it’s only a write once, multi-session finalizing function? 😛
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      24. Sometime back around 1988 I was taking a course in database administration. Our small class had a field trip to the local IBM office where some engineers explained how HDDs work. I said there seemed to be plenty of room inside the demo HDD for another actuator with another set of heads. Why not use it? They were incredulous. Why would I even suggest such a thing? Their HDDs will always write/read much faster than the rest of the data stream could support!

        This is the kind of ‘forward thinking’ that got IBM to where it is today.
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      30. I’ve been a fan of WD for a very very long time, back in the days when Seagate was utter crap and unreliable. However, I hate those WD helium filled drives, their hammering sounds are very irritating and have no reason to do that, even when idle! I purchased a Seagate Exos 18TB a while ago, and it’s whisper quiet (besides the faint 7200 rpm whine, which all drives do by the way) it barely does any hammering sounds like the WD’s do right next to it. And don’t even get me started about WD Elements 8TB+, they freaking vibrate like an earthquake, plus the very loud hammering sounds. As much as I would like to get a 22TB WD, the noise is simply unacceptable and it surprises me they haven’t figured out how to address that yet.

        P.S. I love your channel because you’re the only one who reviews us the noise levels of hdd’s.
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      37. My Drobo 5D3 is considerably louder though I’ve no actual figures to back this statement up.

        I have a Synology DS1621+ and would look for a different system for my two onsite drives. Even though the Synology is easy to use, I was always advised that you should have 3 different types of drive, one of which is off-site.

        Having just watched this test, when my Drobo eventually dies, I might invest in a Q-Nap populated with big drives. Thanks
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      38. Stupid size Shingle drives are only good for CCTV or mega corp data farm media archives. anything else they are a screaming nightmare. just dont even think of using them for regular systems.
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      39. Not long ago I bought a QNAP NAS to store all of my photos and video on. I backup to USB drives. It didn’t take me long to figure out that a NAS with RAID is obsolete with even 18 TB drives.
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      43. sound test on a wooden desk? of course it is going to be louder, so these sound tests are not indicative to the actual sound on a sound dampening surface which you would use if had this setup.
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      49. Just want to say Thank You! Your videos have so much genuinely great advice for those of us who are trying to start up with NAS Drives… I started off with a WD My Cloud Home (Not the greatest experience), recently inherited a Synology DS713+ which was pre set up to RAID0, I’d like to update the second drive as its got a 12TB in (1) and a 4TB in (2), and I’d like to update (2) to something bigger for the future… Will I be able to make sure all the data is on (1) as it shouldnt be filled up as yet, or am I going to have remigrate all the data and set up a fresh install? Also is this a model I can upgrade the Memory on easily? I find Plex runs really slowly and would like to make the most of what I have already. Thanks in advance, Keep up the great videos, 22TB???!!!! WHOA! I dont think I could ever fill that!
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      54. Always keep my Windows, macOS, Synology and QNAP firmware/updates up-to-date but have never updated the firmware on a physical NAS drive. Have main QNAP running 8x 12TB IronWolf drives can you do a video on the do’s and dont’s, the benefits/risk and the process itself?
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      56. As of now I have 34TB being used in my Synology, 5233 movies 657 Tv shows (I don’t know how many episodes) mostly 480p and now slowly going to 1080p and getting very few 4k. Also backing up all of my families phone’s photo’s and videos, free space gets eaten up quick.
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      59. Love your channel. I have an older DS418 that i will be upgrading to a DS922+. I currently have Seagate Ironwolf 8 Tb drives (5400 spin) but plan on upgrading to Synology 12 Tb drives (7200 spin) over time. Will the difference in speed hinder performance until i replace all 4 drives??
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      62. This needs to become a offical measurements for what hard drives can store. I think we need to have a website that will let you choose the show and the quality and say how many episodes the hard drive will store.
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      67. SAME PRICE( MSRP of $600) WITH WD GOLD 22TB (AND WD PURPLE PRO) WICH IS TIMES BETTER AS IT HAS 2,5M MTBF (1M RED PRO),550TB/YEAR WORKLOAD(300TB/YEAR RED PRO) , 291MB/SEC MAX SUSTAINED TRANSFER RATE(265MB/SEC RED PRO) AND 1 IN 10E15 UNRECOVERABLE READ ERRORS(1 IN 10E13 RED PRO)
        I THINK THAT RED PRO 22TB IS EXTREME OVERPRICED AND SO NO RECOMENDED.
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      74. ♥️???????????????????????????????? ???????????????????? ???????????????? ???????????????????????? ????????????????❤️ Alles sehr schön. Aber zuerst zusammen die Nummern 10 und 1. Eine warmthhh.Online Brünette und eine andere Blondine. Es wäre unfairh, wenn ich 4 wählen würde
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      75. If only they made these capacities with their lower noise lines. 45-60 dB is just not tolerable for many use cases that might actually want this storage density in home/office.
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