As per its official documentation, WD’s OptiNAND drive integrates an iNAND Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Embedded Flash Drive with the traditional spinning disk of the HDD, along with an SOC and firmware algorithm. To put it in another way, the OptiNAND portion of WD’s HDD is designed to store metadata which, as PCGamer puts it, essentially store data pertaining to the data that is being stored on the hard drive. For the record, WD isn’t the first storage brand to launch large-scale storage solutions. Its rival, Seagate, already has 18TB and 20TB storage solutions available since 2020, and it plans on launching 100TB HDDs using its Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology by 2025.Going slightly off-tangent to the subject at hand, the data storage company, Nimbus Data, has the ExaDrive DC100, which is a 100TB SSD designed primarily for use in data centres. On that note and as these things usually go, WD’s new OptiNAND HDD wasn’t designed with the general consumer in mind, but more for data centres that are looking for large capacity drives that are also smart and have longer durability. That said, 20TB is still a lot of storage for gamers, especially if you are intent on saddling all of the currently existing games that you own but aren’t actively playing at this current moment. (Source: Western Digital via PCGamer)
