It's HAMR Time For Wd As It Outlines Drive Migration Plans
Blocks&Files, Thursday, February 13th, 2025
Western Digital revealed its HAMR disk technology migration plans in an Investor Day session and already has HAMR drives undergoing qualification by customers.
The Investor Day session was held to reassure investors ahead of the spin-off of the Sandisk NAND and SSD business unit expected by the end of this month. The spin-off is due to the WD stock price not reflecting the actual value of Sandisk, with the hope that an independent Sandisk will have a multi-billion dollar valuation, returning gains to current WD shareholders who will be given 0.33333 shares of Sandisk stock for each WD share they own.
The Sandisk-less Western Digital will be a hard disk drive manufacturer led by CEO Irving Tan. He and his team told investors that there will be 3x growth in generated data to 394ZB from 2023 to 2028. Over half, 59 percent, will be in enterprise data centers and the public cloud, 15 percent in edge devices (in-store controllers, substations, branch offices, etc.) and 26 percent in endpoint devices such as PCs and laptops.