Western Digital’s new high-capacity drives aim to slash AI storage costs

Western Digital outlined a dual-path HDD roadmap for AI at Innovation Day 2026 on Feb. 3. The UltraSMR ePMR path includes a 40TB drive now in qualification with two hyperscale customers and targets volume production in H2 2026, with a 60TB follow-on planned. A parallel HAMR program is also in qualification, with ramp production in 2027 and scaling to 100TB+ by 2029. Performance innovations include High Bandwidth Drive technology, which delivers up to 2x bandwidth today and a path to 8x using simultaneous multi-head read/write operations; customers are validating drives now. Dual Pivot adds a second independent actuator set for up to 2x sequential I/O improvement; combined gains can reach 4x while preserving I/O per TB as capacity grows. Power-optimized HDDs reduce consumption by about 20% for cold AI tiers and enter qualification in 2027. An open-platform API, planned for 2027, extends hyperscale storage economics to mid-scale customers managing 200+ PB, speeding qualification and reducing deployment complexity across UltraSMR, HAMR, and flash.

Why It Matters

• Storage engineers can qualify the 40TB UltraSMR drive now for H2 2026 volume, enabling lower-cost scaling of AI datasets versus flash (6–10x cost differential).
• AI teams can validate High Bandwidth Drives today to double sequential bandwidth and reduce SSD dependency for training and inference workloads.
• Infrastructure architects managing 200+ PB gain an open API in 2027 to deploy HAMR without platform disruption, shortening time-to-capacity.
• Sustainability and ops teams can adopt the 20% lower-power HDDs in 2027 for cold tiers to cut energy for archived AI data while retaining sub-second access.