Hard disk storage has not said its last word. As SSDs gain ground, hard drive manufacturers continue to scale their products to meet the needs of the cloud and servers. Western Digital has just launched 28 TB hard drives.
By 2028, mechanical hard drives (the famous HDDs) should disappear, ending a history of more than 75 years of magnetic storage. But Western Digital, a leading manufacturer of hard drives, has just announced that it will offer its customers 28 TB hard drives, one year after launching its 26 TB models.
These discs utilize proven technologies such as perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and overlapping magnetic recording (SMR), which allow more data to be stored on trays without increasing their physical size.
Western Digital challenges Seagate with 28 TB laser-free hard drives
These technologies are different from HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording), which uses lasers to heat trays during writing and promises even higher capabilities. Seagate, Western Digital’s main competitor, has already announced 32 TB HAMR discs and is aiming for 50 TB by 2025.
But Western Digital is not in a hurry to switch to HAMR, which it still considers too immature. The firm believes it can reach the 30 TB and even 32 TB with its current technologies, which offer better reliability and performance. It intends to launch its HAMR discs in volume from the end of 2025 at the earliest.
Western Digital’s hard drives primarily cater to the cloud and server markets, where storage demand is still high. But the company also offers drives for PCs and consumers, even though hard drive sales have dropped by 40%.
Western Digital hopes to take advantage of the recovery of the IT market after the Covid-19 crisis. The largest hard drive that can be integrated into a personal computer is currently the SeaGate IronWolf 22 TB.
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