Western Digital outlines new HDD capacity, performance and power gains for AI workloads – SiliconANGLE

UPDATED 09:30 EST / FEBRUARY 03 2026
by Duncan Riley
Western Digital Corp. today unveiled a new customer-centric storage roadmap that it says reinvents the hard drive for artificial intelligence needs and reinforces its position as a strategic storage infrastructure partner for the AI-driven data economy.
The announcements, made at the company’s virtual Innovation Day 2026, mark a major milestone in WD’s ongoing transformation into a pure-play hard-disk-drive company focused on hyperscale and cloud customers. The company outlined a multiyear strategy centered on scaling up capacity, improving performance, lowering power consumption and reducing deployment complexity as AI workloads drive explosive data growth across cloud infrastructure.
Leading the list of announcements, WD revealed that its 40-terabyte UltraSMR ePMR HDD, currently the world’s highest-capacity drive, is already in qualification with hyperscale customers, with volume production planned for the second half of 2026. The company added that qualifications of its heat-assisted magnetic recording-based HDDs are also underway with hyperscale customers, with ramp production expected in 2027.
WD also introduced new performance technologies aimed at supporting AI workloads that were previously considered flash-only.
Introduced today, WD’s new High Bandwidth Drive technology allows simultaneous reads and writes across multiple heads and tracks, delivering up to twice the bandwidth of conventional HDDs with a roadmap to far higher gains. Another new technology, called Dual Pivot design, adds independently operating actuators to boost sequential input/output performance without sacrificing capacity.
High Bandwidth Drive technology and Dual Pivot design, together, are expected to close the performance gap significantly with QLC flash while maintaining HDD cost advantages.
Power efficiency was another major focus of the announcements made by WD today, with the company previewing a new class of power-optimized HDDs that are designed for AI cold data that must remain quickly accessible. The drives are expected to reduce power consumption by around 20%, shrinking the gap between warm and cold storage tiers and enabling lower total cost of ownership for large-scale AI data retention.
The power-optimized drives are planned for 2027.
Aside from hardware, WD also said it’s expanding its Platforms business to reduce complexity and accelerate time-to-value for large enterprise customers.
Planned future releases include an intelligent software layer that is delivered through an open application programming interface and expected to launch in 2027. The software layer is designed to bring hyperscale storage economics to organizations operating at 200-petabyte scale and beyond. The platform will so simplify qualification and deployment across WD’s UltraSMR, ePMR, flash and HAMR offerings.
“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 Chief Executive Irving Tan.
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Western Digital outlines new HDD capacity, performance and power gains for AI workloads
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