Hyperscale cloud, cloud services, enterprises, intelligent video surveillance, NAS, and other storage-intensive applications require solutions that can handle the exponential growth of data volumes. When it comes to cost-effective storage with large capacity, HDDs (hard disk drives) will continue to play a central role. HDDs provide the necessary capacity, performance, and reliability to store vast amounts of data today and in the future. Investments in HDD technology remain a critical solution for global data growth. Western Digital has developed flash-based hard drives with OptiNAND technology through the vertical integration of its NAND flash into its premium HDDs. Western Digital HDDs achieve perfect areal density thanks to revolutionary technologies such as EAMR (Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording), TSA (Triple-Stage Actuator), HelioSeal, and now OptiNAND. The higher areal density results in greater capacity to meet the challenges of data growth. OptiNAND combines iNAND UFS EFD storage (Universal Flash Storage Embedded Flash Drive) with the proven rotating storage medium and implements innovative changes to the firmware algorithm and SoC (System-on-a-Chip). However, OptiNAND is not a hybrid technology. Thanks to improved firmware algorithms, the hard drives become smarter: they leverage the extensive metadata that has been offloaded to the iNAND, allowing for more TPI (Tracks Per Inch) and greater areal density to be achieved.