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  "path": "/article/4134750/western-digital-wants-to-ramp-up-hard-disk-drive-speeds.html",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-19T18:30:04.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.networkworld.com",
  "tags": [
    "CPUs and Processors, Industry, Markets, Technology Industry",
    "Western Digital",
    "HDD throughput",
    "Reed Martin, a senior project manager with Western",
    "blog",
    "HAMR",
    "Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital"
  ],
  "textContent": "At its recent Innovation Day 2026 event, Western Digital previewed two technologies in development to increase HDD throughput: high bandwidth drive technology (HBDT) and dual pivot technology (DPT).\n\nHBDT enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks, delivering up twice the bandwidth of conventional HDDs without power penalties. DPT adds a second set of independently operating actuators on a separate pivot and will deliver up to twice the sequential IO gain within a 3.5-inch drive.\n\nThere have been dual actuator designs in the past, but they sacrificed capacity and required extensive customer software changes. DPT enables reduced spacing between disks, allowing for more platters per drive and higher overall capacity.\n\nWestern Digital’s ultimate aim is to combine HBDT and DPT into a single drive, which could deliver up to four times the bandwidth of current HDDs, which would be around 1.2GB/s, and without using more power than a standard HDD.\n\n“Combined in the same drive, two-track HBDT plus dual pivot is projected to increase throughput from today’s 300MB/s to approximately 1.2GB/s, a 4x increase, while preserving HDD economics. This restores throughput-per-terabyte parity as capacities scale, helping ensure future 100TB HDDs behave like today’s 26TB drives from an access perspective,” wrote Reed Martin, a senior project manager with Western Digital in a blog about the news. “This would give the theoretical 100TB HDDs of the future a throughput/TB equivalent to today’s 26TB HDDs.”\n\nThe caveat is that this is only applicable to a SATA-based hard disk. A SATA-based drive, whether it is hard disk or in an SSD, maxes out at about 550MB/s of throughput. That’s the great equalizer between hard disk and flash drives: the ancient (in technological terms) SATA port.\n\nMost enterprises are not using SATA drives, at least not with hot data. Perhaps cold storage but not frequently accessed data. They are using PCI Express based drives and those are considerably faster than anything Western Digital can engineer in a hard disk.\n\nCapacity aside, Western Digital is also aiming for much, much higher capacity. WD is working on developing a 100TB hard drive for the enterprise market based on HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology, which are expected to ship by 2029.\n\nThe company has another technology, ePMR (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording). The company expects to ship 40TB drives by this year and should reach 60TB in a few years as well.\n\nWestern Digital also announced the expansion of its Platforms business to extend hyperscale storage economics to a broader set of customers.\n\nThis expansion includes the development of an intelligent software layer, through an open API, expected to launch in 2027, that will enable companies at 200+ petabyte scale to achieve the same storage efficiency and economics that hyperscalers enjoy today.\n\n“For the past year, WD has remained continuously focused on execution and accelerating innovation, which has enabled us to truly reimagine the hard drive to meet the requirements of AI,” said Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital in a statement. “Today, we are showcasing innovation that reflects our deep connection to our customers and how we are meeting demand for capacity, scale, quality, enhanced performance, and ease of technology adoption.”",
  "title": "Western Digital wants to ramp-up hard disk drive speeds"
}