At Computex, Western Digital reiterated plans to start high-volume shipments of hard disk drives featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology in 2027. However, before going all-in with HAMR, the company plans to introduce its last and final ePMR 2-based generation of HDDs next year.
Western Digital’s initial HAMR drives will come in several variants: a 36TB version using conventional magnetic recording, a 40 TB model using shingled track layout (SMR), and a 44TB model using UltraSMR technology with a variety of proprietary enhancements aimed at select partners. But before launching HAMR-based products, Western Digital intends to offer a 36TB HDD featuring its UltraSMR technology and a lower capacity CMR HDD featuring energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR 2) technology sometime next year.
Western Digital hopes that HAMR technology will provide enough potential to increase HDD capacities to 80TB (CMR) – 100TB (UltraSMR) by 2030, which suggests a pretty aggressive capacity increase starting in 2027.
Seagate’s bet on HAMR seems to have paid off. The company is shipping its HAMR-based HDDs to partners (albeit not to everyone) and its lineup already includes a 36TB shingled HAMR hard drive. By now, only Toshiba — the world’s third maker of hard drives — has not formally announced its HAMR transition timeframe.
