- Digital western targeting 40 to HDD by the end of 2026 using Hamr Tech
- Optinand and Ultrasmr will increase capacity until HAMR adoption begins to stimulate growth
- AI boom storage request should arrive at the end of 2026
Western Digital recently organized a day of investors, with a main accent on how he intends to overcome hard disk capacity in a decade.
The detailed WD roadmap showed a clear technological evolution of the magnetic recording perpendicular assisted by energy (EPMR) with magnetic recording assisted by heat (HAMR), and finally to the magnetic recording of heating points (HDMR), how much it will be targeting the capabilities greater than 100 TB.
By 2026, WD said that its hard drive capacity will reach 36 TB-44 TB thanks to HAMR technology which uses laser heating to temporarily lower the magnetic resistance (coercitivity) of the disc, allowing significantly more dense writing.
Awaiting request
In a recent interview with PC watchKimihiko Nishio, sales director for Western Digital Japan, consulted more details on the company’s plans.
“Other companies have started to adopt Hamr with hard drives of 30 TB, but we think that Hamr’s real potential begins at 40 TB,” said Nishio.
“Until then, we will continue to use technologies like Optinand and Ultrasmr to increase the capacity of existing hard drives up to 40 TB.” Optinand, incorporates flash memory with hard drives to increase capacity, performance and reliability, while Ultrasmr, uses an advanced error correction to pack the data more densely than the traditional SMR.
“We are targeting the second half of 2026 for the release of the 40 TB records,” said Nishio, adding that WD “is currently developing Hamr thinking about this objective”. He explained that although the data generation is booming, in particular due to AI progress, the storage request is still catching up.
“Right now, there is a huge increase in generative AI demand, but storage has not yet really benefited. Currently, the biggest beneficiaries are the GPU servers. First, the data is generated in large volumes, and after that, it should be stored. This is where we expect storage.”
Western Digital creates its production plans to coincide with this planned request. “We plan that Spike will occur in the second half of 2026, which is why we align our development of Hamr high capacity hard drive on this period,” said Nishio.
“Since HAMR production requires a complete overhaul of materials, starting the production now while demand is still low (for example, for training of 40 TB) would result in high costs. But we expect that in 2 to 3 years, demand will increase, allowing us to offer them at reasonable prices. ”
Nishio also shared an even more ambitious long -term vision of Western Digital. “Looking further, we plan to publish discs of 100 TB by 2030, after which we will seek even more important capacities using new technologies,” he said.
