Hard Drive Roadmap: Western Digital Changes in 2026 to HAMR for 36TB and Up 24 comments
Image: Western Digital
The future of hard drives is also in HAMR technology, which Seagate has already introduced. Western Digital’s first HDD HDDS will not be released until the end of 2026, as the manufacturer has now announced in the form of a new roadmap.
Western Digital presents HDD roadmap with HAMR
As part of Investor Day, Western Digital CEO-designate Irving Tan presented a new HDD roadmap. It seals the end of the EPMR technology currently used up to a storage capacity of 36 TB.
After that, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) should find its way. By the end of 2026, Western Digital’s first HAMR hard drives are expected to be completed. However, larger quantities can only be expected for 2027, as the CEO granted during the last question and answer session in front of investors and media representatives.
Western Digital HDD Roadmap (February 2025) (Image: Western Digital)
The roadmap suggests that HAMR HDDs with 36TB and Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) will appear first. With the overlapping data traces aka ultrasmr, 44TB should be possible.
Competitor Seagate currently offers HAMR hard drives with 30 TB (CMR) and 32 TB (SMR), but has already promised an SMR model with 36 TB.
We could already 40TB, but…
Western Digital will not tire of emphasizing that the right time must be chosen to move to HAMR. The manufacturer had often explained that HAMR was not yet ready for the market, while Seagate had rushed to launch the technology in small series, which, after Seagate’s announcements, should be ready for years earlier. To date, however, it is unclear how many HAMR-HDDS Seagate has actually been delivered to customers. There has been talk of limited availability for a long time.
From Tan’s perspective, you need to be able to ship at least one million units per quarter of a product. The CEO pointed out that Western Digital could already produce a HAMR hard drive with 40 TB, but the yield would not yet be economical. The manufacturer still has a lot of work ahead of it in Hamr, Tan also admitted.
Topics: Hamr Storage Hard Drives Western Digital Source: Western Digital
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