Western Digital's plans for HAMR hard disk drives will materialize in 2027

Forward-looking: Western Digital remains one of the world's largest hard drive manufacturers, although it trails Seagate in adopting the latest recording technologies. However, the company has announced that major advancements are planned for its HDD lineup over the next few years. At the recent Computex trade show in Taipei, Western Digital confirmed that its first hard drives based on Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology are scheduled to debut in 2027. Before then, however, the San Jose – based company plans to introduce another generation of hard drives built on its proven ePMR 2 recording platform. WD's initial HAMR lineup is expected to include a 36TB model using Conventional Magnetic Recording, and a 40TB model leveraging Shingled Magnetic Recording. Additionally, the company plans to offer a 44TB drive based on its proprietary UltraSMR technology to select partners. As most storage professionals know, SMR drives use overlapping data tracks to increase capacity, b ... Read full article.