Western Digital Sees HAMR Capacity Advantage In Roadmap
Blocks & Files, Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025
Interview: We had the opportunity to speak with Ahmed Shihab, Western Digital chief product and engineering officer, and he told us that WD's HAMR tech is progressing well, that OptiNAND can provide a capacity advantage, and that the company has a way to increase the bandwidth per terabyte of disk drives.
Shihab joined Western Digital in March, following more than a year as a corporate VP for Microsoft Azure storage and eight years as AWS VP for Infrastructure hardware. Azure and AWS will be two of the largest hyperscaler buyers for nearline disk drive storage, which is WD's biggest market. Shihab will have detailed knowledge of how these hyperscalers evaluate disk drive product transitions and what they look out for, invaluable to Western Digital as it follows Seagate with its own HAMR technology transition. It will not want to endure Seagate's multi-year HAMR drive qualification saga.