Western Digital has announced its roadmap detailing the commercialization of storage units in the coming years, highlighting, among all the solutions, the new hard drives with 100 TB capacity in 2029.
Hard drives continue to be essential in the technology industry no matter how much they have been surpassed in terms of performance, occupied space or consumption of solid state drives based on NAND flash memories. Simply, Its value in Price per GB is unbeatable. Something that has become evident in a time of memory crisis that threatens to cause a reversal of the PC market. If in personal computers SSDs dominate almost 100% of the market, in servers and data centers hard drives maintain a fundamental presence for their maintenance.
WD, the world’s leading hard drive seller, has made important announcements about its short, medium and long-term roadmap at its ‘Innovation Day 2026’ event. The key point of the strategy lies in the plans to expand the energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording technology for the commercialization of new 40 and 60 TB hard drives.
This means that ePMR hard drives will coexist with drives based on more advanced technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The idea is to combine its deployment over several years to ensure the constant availability of high-capacity units.
The company plans to launch a 40TB UltraSMR hard drive next in the second half of this year and intends to continue using this technology for at least a couple of years before HAMR-based solutions take over when hard drive capacity reaches 60TB.
These new generation ePMR units will take advantage of HAMR innovations without increasing energy consumption, the company has assured without explaining what specific functions it will be able to take advantage of. It could use a unified platform for ePMR and HAMR units with next-generation supports using platinum iron (FePt), allowing much higher areal densities than today.
«The result is unprecedented flexibility»they say from Western Digital. “Hyperscalers and enterprises can adopt either technology on their own timelines, with predictable capacity planning and seamless scaling – no forced technology transitions or infrastructure disruptions, just continued, accelerated capacity growth based on an architecture they already trust.”.
As for HAMR hard drives, they are still on the way for mass production in 2027 after being approved by Western Digital’s hyperscale customers. The company plans to advance its HAMR-based offerings at a high pace with plans to offer 40 and 60 TB hard drives, reaching the aforementioned 100 TB hard drives in less than three years.
