After abandoning the SSD segment, Western Digital was forced to show its muscle against Seagate.
A few months ago, Western Digital and Sandisk agreed to part ways. In doing so, Western Digital put an end to its entire SSD catalog and focused on its historic core business, platter-type hard drives. The technology may seem outdated, but at a time when we're experiencing major inflation around NAND, and when data centers and artificial intelligence models require gargantuan amounts of storage space, the hard disk is showing that it still has its place... a little less at home, that's all.
Western Digital's roadmap "towards 100 TB" © Western Digital
Western Digital was keen to show that it was still well up to the level of Seagate, which a few months ago was the first to market a platter hard drive with a capacity of 40 TB. At its Innovation Day, Western Digital responded with its first " UltraSMR ePMR 40TB " model, which should above all pave the way for a drastic " high-capacity roadmap acceleration ". Until now, the American brand has been rather shy in its announcements, but now there's no question of being cautious: 40TB models are now available, and a 44TB HAMR hard disk will be launched at the end of the year. Better still, Western Digital is planning 60TB models for 2028, and nothing less than 100TB disks in 2029! Yes, 100TB on a 3.5" hard disk.
Capacity is not Western Digital's only battle-horse, however, as the company is also promoting two major technologies to boost the speed of its drives: High Bandwidth Drive and Dual Pivot. The American firm explains that " High Bandwidth Drive technology enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks, offering up to 2x more bandwidth than traditional hard disks without energy penalty ". Better still, according to Western Digital, it has a " clear evolution trajectory up to 8x bandwidth gains, and is already in the hands of customers for validation ".
Some of Western Digital's ideas for reaching 100TB by 2029 © Western Digital
For its part, Dual Pivot technology is presented in these terms: " Dual Pivot technology adds a second set of actuators operating independently around a separate pivot and will offer up to 2x sequential I/O gain in a 3.5-inch drive. It differs from previous dual-actuator designs, which sacrificed capacity and required cumbersome software modifications on the client side. Dual Pivot reduces the spacing between disks, allowing more platters per disk and higher total capacity ". Of course, we'll have to verify Western Digital's claims over the coming months, but the future of hard disk drives looks bright.
