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Ahead-looking: The info storage panorama is evolving quickly, pushed by the proliferation of synthetic intelligence and the rising demand for enormous knowledge lakes. Western Digital initiatives that HDD exabyte shipments will develop at a compound annual progress price of 23% from 2024 to 2028. To satisfy these growing calls for, the corporate is specializing in two key improvements that may drive capability growth and improve storage effectivity.
Western Digital unveiled an formidable roadmap for superior storage applied sciences at a current investor day assembly. It plans to leverage two superior storage applied sciences within the coming years: heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and warmth dot magnetic recording (HDMR), that are anticipated to enhance knowledge storage effectivity and density in arduous disk drives.
This announcement comes as Western Digital prepares to separate its Flash enterprise, with the spin-off scheduled for February 21, 2025.
HAMR expertise makes use of a small laser diode connected to every recording head to warmth a tiny spot on the disk. This localized heating quickly reduces the coercivity of the recording materials, enabling the write head to change the magnetic polarity of a single bit at a time.
By permitting knowledge to be written in a lot smaller areas, HAMR considerably will increase storage density. This system requires exact temperature management to make sure that solely the meant space is heated, with nanosecond-level heating and cooling of particular person bits.
Western Digital plans to introduce its first HAMR-based HDDs in 2026, with preliminary capacities of 36TB for typical magnetic recording (CMR) and 44TB for shingled UltraSMR recording. The corporate is already testing HAMR drives with two main hyperscale prospects. By 2030, Western Digital goals to develop HDDs with capacities starting from 80TB to 100TB utilizing HAMR expertise.
In parallel, Western Digital can be growing HDMR expertise, which mixes heat-assisted writing with bit-patterned media (BPM). HDMR has the potential to realize even greater areal densities, probably exceeding 8 Tb/inch². This might allow 10-platter HDDs with capacities of 120TB or extra.
HDMR expertise entails bodily patterning disks utilizing lithography or etching tools in cleanroom environments. This course of ensures uniform grain dimension and exact bit placement, leading to extra predictable magnetic properties. The mix of bodily isolation of bits with energy-assisted writing permits unprecedented storage densities.
Nonetheless, HDMR is predicted to be fairly costly attributable to its advanced manufacturing necessities. The transition to those applied sciences will necessitate substantial investments, together with the event of latest sorts of lasers for extremely exact localized heating.
Western Digital is specializing in a number of key areas to assist these. This contains refining servo-mechanics for exact head positioning, conducting magnetics analysis into superior supplies equivalent to iron-platinum alloys, and growing new thermal administration and management methods to accommodate the following era of HDD expertise.