The American company is advancing towards a new generation of mass storage with HAMR and MAMR technologies, seeking to respond to the growing demand for data centers and optimize the cost per gigabyte.
Western Digital has confirmed its plans to launch its first 40-terabyte hard drives in 2026, marking a new milestone in the storage industry. The announcement was made by Kimihiko Nishio, the company’s sales manager in Japan, in an interview with PC Watch, where he emphasized that these high-capacity drives will be based on HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology.
Although SSDs have gained traction in personal computers due to their speed and durability, mechanical hard drives remain essential in sectors that require large-scale storage, such as data centers and enterprise servers, where the cost per gigabyte is still a critical variable.
The Role of HAMR in HDD Evolution
The HAMR technology significantly increases recording density by using a laser to locally heat the disk surface, thus facilitating the magnetic writing process. This allows more data to be stored in less physical space, which is essential to meet the growing data demand in sectors such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the storage of large volumes of multimedia content.
Western Digital expects that the manufacturing costs of these units will gradually decrease, facilitating their adoption not only in corporate environments but also among advanced users or SMEs. “As the demand increases, unit costs tend to decrease,” explained Nishio.
MAMR: The Big Technological Surprise from Western Digital
However, not all the attention is on HAMR. Western Digital has surprised the sector by also announcing significant advances with an alternative technology: MAMR (Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording).
While HAMR has traditionally been seen as the natural successor to current recording technologies, MAMR offers a solution with notable competitive advantages. Among them, its greater reliability and less technical complexity stand out, which could translate into more cost-effective and scalable mass production.
According to the company, MAMR could achieve densities of up to 4 TB per square inch, maintaining an excellent reliability rate and avoiding the thermal challenges associated with HAMR. With these projections, Western Digital expects to launch MAMR-based hard drives of up to 40 TB as early as 2025, even ahead of its original roadmap.
“MAMR is one of the two technologies we have been working on for years. Recently, we have made significant advances in materials and processes that allow us to accelerate area density and reduce costs by an average of 15% annually,” the company stated.
HDD vs. SSD: A Decided Battle?
Although many users may consider hard drives to be on the verge of extinction, experts warn that this view is not entirely accurate. Hard drives remain indispensable in applications where large capacity at low cost is needed, especially in digital infrastructures such as data centers, where energy efficiency and density per physical unit are key factors.
In this regard, David Carrero Fernández-Baillo, co-founder of Stackscale (Grupo Aire), a European provider of cloud and bare-metal infrastructure, emphasizes:
“Innovation in storage technologies such as HAMR and MAMR is crucial for continuing to scale capacity without compromising costs or energy efficiency. In high data density environments like artificial intelligence data centers, every additional terabyte counts, and having 40 TB drives will change the game.”
Conclusion
The roadmap announced by Western Digital not only reaffirms the relevance of hard drives in today’s technological landscape but also opens the door to a new generation of ultra-high capacity storage solutions. With the support of technologies like HAMR and MAMR, along with the constant drive of the data industry, HDDs still have a lot to offer.
The future of mass storage seems to be marked by a combination of innovation, efficiency, and sustainability, with Western Digital positioning itself as one of the key players in this evolution.