WD wants you to never have to by another storage device again. The digital storage company—also known as Western Digital—announced its new High Bandwidth Drive and Dual Pivot technology.
The Dual Pivot technology, WD says, will add a second set of “independently operating actuators on a separate pivot and will deliver up to 2x sequential IO gain within a 3.5-inch drive.”
“This differs from previous dual actuator designs that sacrificed capacity and required extensive customer software changes,” WD says. “Dual Pivot enables reduced spacing between disks, allowing for more platters per drive and higher overall capacity.”
The High Bandwidth Drive will allow simultaneous writing and reading from multiple heads on multiple tracks. This technology, according to WD, will offer double the bandwidth of standard HDDs without any power setbacks.
“The technology has a clear path to scale up to 8x bandwidth gains and is already in customer hands for validation,” they said.
With the new technologies, and others that continue to improve, WD has plans to scale its HDD offerings in a major way over the next few years. The company has already announced its 40TB UltraSMR ePMR HDD that will enter production in the second half of 2026.
After the 40TB drive comes a 60TB offering before moving to 100TB by 2029.
“The result is unprecedented flexibility,” they say. “Hyperscalers and enterprises can adopt either technology on their own timelines with predictable capacity planning and seamless scaling – no forced technology transitions, no infrastructure disruptions, just continuous and accelerating capacity growth built on architecture they already trust.”
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Mike has been covering the gaming industry since 2012, and has reported on some of the largest events in the industry while also working as an investigative reporter. Outside of…
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