speaking of HDD harddisk, many people may think that the only advantage left is “large capacity”. If you want to pursue speed, you still have to give it to SSD, but in the recent Innovation Day event,WD The two new technologies announced can double the performance, and in the long run, as the capacity becomes larger, it can be improved by up to 8 times.
In addition, WD also expects to see hard drives with a capacity of more than 100TB in 2029. Of course, this is a product designed for enterprises, and ordinary users will not use such a large drive.
Image source: VideoCardz
WD plans to launch 100TB enterprise HDD hard drive in 2029
According to reports from foreign media PC Watch, WD announced several quite good technologies and plans at this Western Digital Innovation Day event in the United States.
First up is the HAMR HDD.
HAMR is a new generation of HDD hard drive using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording technology. When writing data, the magnetic head will first heat a small spot on the surface of the disk to make it easier to write data, and then immediately cool and fix it. Because it can be written more densely, more content can be stored on the same size hard drive. This design is mainly used in large data centers.
One of the current mainstream enterprise-level HDD technologies is ePMR, and HAMR can be regarded as a next-generation new technology.
Image source: PC Watch
WD said that the HAMR product is still being evaluated and tested on the client side, but it plans to launch 40TB and 44TB models in 2026, followed by 60TB in 2028, and challenge the 100TB capacity target in 2029.
In order to give everyone a better idea of how big 100TB is, foreign media VideoCardz gave a very interesting example. Currently, the total capacity of all “Decisive Hour” games on the PC platform is at least about 2TB. In other words, a 100TB hard drive can probably install the entire series about 50 times.
PC Watch’s report also mentioned that WD’s long-term expansion goal is to increase the recording density per disc to a maximum of 10TB, with a maximum of 14 discs per hard drive, which means that it can theoretically reach 140TB.
Two new technologies, High Bandwidth Drive and Dual Pivot
In order to improve the performance of HDD, WD has launched two new technologies: “High Bandwidth Drive” and “Dual Pivot”.
“High Bandwidth Drive” uses a Triple Stage Actuator for more precise head positioning, so multiple heads can access multiple tracks at the same time, thereby improving throughput.
In vernacular, the hard disk can read and write in “multi-path parallel” at the same time. It no longer needs to take care of one data path at a time like traditional HDD. Compared with existing HDD, it can improve:
- Random access performance improved by up to 1.7 times
- Continuous access performance increased by up to 2 times
WD aims to increase overall performance by up to 8x by 2030.
Image source: PC Watch
“Dual Pivot” configures an independent actuator on the top and bottom of the disk, which means that the same hard disk can perform two read and write operations at the same time to increase the IOPS that can be processed per second and improve the continuous access performance by up to 2 times.
Image source: PC Watch
More importantly, WD emphasizes that unlike past dual-actuator designs, Dual Pivot does not increase power consumption, does not require major modifications to hardware or software, and can be directly imported into existing systems.
WD said that when the High Bandwidth Drive and Dual Pivot are combined, the HDD’s sequential read and write performance will be improved by up to 4 times compared to traditional designs. This will allow workloads that were originally considered to be imported into QLC Flash to be handled by HDD, significantly reducing costs:
Image source: PC Watch
Source: KOCPC Chinese