Western Digital Plans To Launch 40TB HDD Next Year Using HAMR Technology And A Pinch Of Flash Memory
techradar, Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025
WD says AI-driven storage demand will spike in late 2026
Western Digital recently held an investor day, with a primary focus on how it intends to supercharge hard drive capacity within a decade.
WD's detailed roadmap showed a clear technological evolution from energy-assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR) to Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), and ultimately to Heat Dot Magnetic Recording (HDMR), at which point it will be targeting capacities in excess of 100TB.
By 2026, WD said its HDD capacity will reach 36TB-44TB thanks to HAMR technology which uses laser heating to temporarily lower the magnetic resistance (coercivity) of the disk, allowing for significantly denser data writing.