- WD has 40TB hard drives already being qualified with hyperscale customers
- UltraSMR and ePMR enable higher platter density without changing drive form factors
- Dual Pivot adds a second actuator without sacrificing usable drive capacity
Western Digital has revealed plans to scale hard drives well beyond current commercial limits, starting with a 40TB model already undergoing customer qualification.
The company says its 40TB UltraSMR ePMR drive is already in the hands of hyperscale customers, with volume production expected in the second half of 2026.
This 40TB model uses UltraSMR and ePMR technologies, which allow more data to be written per platter while maintaining the reliability levels expected in large data centers.
Dual Pivot – a key technology for evolving hard drives
At the heart of WD’s roadmap is Dual Pivot technology, which introduces a second independently controlled actuator into the same 3.5-inch package.
Unlike previous dual-actuator approaches, this design avoids capacity trade-offs and does not require client-side software modifications.
By reducing the spacing between drives and allowing additional platters per drive, WD says the design supports higher capacity and improved throughput.
When combined with high-bandwidth drive technology, sequential input and output performance can reach 4 times current levels.
High-bandwidth drive technology enables simultaneous reading and writing to multiple heads and tracks, increasing throughput without increasing power consumption.
This approach underpins WD’s claim that it can scale to 100TB HDDs by 2029 without requiring customers to replace existing infrastructure or move workloads entirely to SSDs.
According to WD’s roadmap, after shipping the 40TB ePMR drives this year, it will start working on 40TB and 44TB HAMR-based drives.
In 2027, ePMR capacity remains at 40 TB while HAMR increases further, but by 2028 ePMR increases to 60 TB and HAMR reaches the same capacity as it moves into wider production.
The following year, 2029, HAMR-based drives will reach 100TB, and this capacity will extend to 2030 and beyond.
As capacities increase, power consumption becomes a limiting factor for data centers deploying thousands of drives.
WD recognized this by developing power-optimized hard drives that trade some random input and output capabilities for higher density and lower power consumption.
These drives target training and inference workloads and reduce power consumption by approximately 20% while maintaining sub-second access times.
It targets large data sets that need to remain quickly accessible, but are too expensive to store entirely on SSD.
WD expects these power-optimized drives to enter customer qualification in 2027, which matches the timeline for larger capacity models beyond 40TB.
Whether these technologies can scale smoothly to 100TB while maintaining reliability and cost advantages will only become clear once broader deployments begin.
“Over the past year, WD has remained focused on executing and accelerating innovation, allowing us to reinvent the hard drive to meet the demands of AI,” said Irving Tan, Chairman and CEO of WD.
“Today we are introducing an innovation that reflects our deep connection with our customers and how we meet demand for capacity, scalability, quality, improved performance and ease of technology adoption.
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