22TB Hard Drives will arrive next year

Western Digital this week revealed several important details regarding its hard drive roadmap at the 5th Annual Virtual Wells Fargo TMT Summit Conference. The company is optimistic about the demand for HDDs in the future and expects its current technologies to deliver drives with capacities up to 30TB in the next few years.

There are two general ways to increase the capacity of a hard drive. One is to install platters with a larger capacity, which sometimes requires the use of new magnetic recording technology (such as HAMR) and multiple new components along with the new discs. Another is to install more platters, which requires switching to thinner platters and sometimes different mechanical components. Hard drive manufacturers usually combine these approaches, so over time the industry moves to both new magnetic recording technologies and multi-drive platforms.

Western Digital's most advanced HDD, the Ultrastar DC The 20TB HC560 and the 20TB WD Gold, use nine 2.2TB platters, energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) and OptiNAND technology. Apparently, the company already knows how to add a flat tenth to provide 22TB of storage. David Goeckeler, chief executive of Western Digital (as reported by SeekingAlpha), said: “we can supply our 20TB out of nine platters, we can add the tenth and get another 2.2TB of storage space“.

Western Digital HDDs with OptiNAND technology add an iNAND UFS integrated flash drive (EFD) to increase performance, reliability and usable capacity. Western Digital will continue to use this technology with ePMR, pairing it with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to provide greater capacity for customers who have optimized their software for SMR. Western Digital believes that its ePMR and OptiNAND technologies will allow it to build HDDs with a capacity of up to 30TB. This figure is quite impressive as it requires the company to increase the area density of its platters by 36% over the next few years, as well as the number of discs to 10. But from 30TB and up, Western Digital will have to use HAMR technology.

What is a little surprising is that Western Digital hasn't said a word about its MAMR technology, which was to bring hard drive capacity up to 40TB. Western Digital has always viewed its ePMR technology as an intermediate step between normal PMR and MAMR, which would eventually be replaced by HAMR.