Western Digital says it can push hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with tweaks that lift HDD performance for AI and cloud workloads.
It sketched a longer-term plan featuring new heat-assisted magnetic recording, higher areal-density platters, and assemblies with up to 14 platters, pointing to drives beyond 140TB in the 2030s.
In a statement, the outfit said that it will volume-produce its first commercial HAMR drives next year, starting at 40TB using CMR or 44TB using SMR in late 2026, then ramping production in 2027.
The company is leaning on its 11-platter platform plus HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy on the platter to its Curie temperature, making it easier to write data.
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rn Digital, chief product officer Ahmed Shihab said: “Everybody in the industry, us included, uses what is called an edge-emitting laser. They work really well. They are the ones powering HAMR today, but they have three challenges. The light sometimes produced is wasted, so some energy is lost that could be used elsewhere. They’re quite tall, so we have to make sure the platters are some distance apart from each other. And during the hard drive manufacturing process, the yields are not as good as we’d like them to be.”
He says yields are rough because the lasers rely on mechanical cleaving and precision optical alignment, and they cannot be wafer-tested so they only get checked in the final head assembly.
Western Digital claims it has spent six years developing a patented vertical-emitting laser that shines directly down onto the media, delivers more energy to the disk, and sits lower in the Z-dimension.
That shorter assembly should enable it to pack more disks into the same 3.5-inch drive, while also increasing areal density from today’s 4 TB per platter to 10TB per platter by 2028.
Western Digital, chief product officer Ahmed Shihab said: “By emitting more light, harnessing more of that light into the recording technology, we will increase the aerial density of the HAMR platters from four terabytes all the way to 10 terabytes by 2028 per platter,”
He said: “This technology is not theoretical. It is actually already in the labs. We have watched it during the recording.”
Capacity is not just about lasers; Western Digital is also developing an HDD platform capable of supporting up to 14 platters, with a 12-platter version first used for 60TB ePMR drives in 2028.
The company is not saying how many platters its 60TB HAMR drive will use, but it claims ePMR and HAMR will share the same platform, so the mechanical layout should be broadly similar.
Western Digital, chief product officer Ahmed Shihab said: “To get to 60, we will go to 12 platters. We are packing more capacity into the same 3.5-inch form factor, without changing the drive’s power profile. The customers don’t have to spend more energy doing what we do.”
Shihab frames the vertical laser as a reset for HAMR scaling rather than a one-off jump, with aggressive growth from 2028 and 100TB HDDs pencilled in around 2029 to 2030.
Once the vertical laser reaches its ceiling with granular media in the 2030s, Western Digital expects to deliver around 140TB per drive using 10TB platters in a 14-platter build.
Performance is also getting a push through dual-actuator Dual Pivot drives that Western Digital says can double bandwidth and sequential I/O IOPS, with the company targeting the same 60TB capacity point.
Western Digital has not said whether those Dual Pivot models are ePMR or HAMR, but it is already pushing the idea that customers should spend less time babysitting storage behaviour and more time tuning AI pipelines.
