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Western Digital is announcing several new hard drives today with expanded storage capacities thanks to its new 11-platter design. The company previously offered 10-platter drives and is now cranking it up to 11, literally. This has allowed it to produce its first hard drive with more than 30TB capacity and add a few terabytes to its standard CMR data center drive. The drives are the first commercially available HDDs to offer an 11-platter design, as all other drives on the market still use 10 platters.
The company announced three new drives for data center and enterprise. It is announcing a 32TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive for data center, its highest capacity drive and its first to go beyond 30TB. If SMR isn’t your thing, it’s also announcing two conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drives: the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC590 and the 26TB WD Gold SATA drive. All three drives boast an 11-platter design, allowing WD to boost capacity without making the drives physically larger.
The 26TB WD Gold is priced at $714.99.
Credit: WD
The new drives represent a decent boost in capacity compared to last year’s moving of the storage goalposts. At that time, WD announced a 28TB SMR drive and 26TB CMR drives, so it added 4TB and 2TB to its lineup, respectively. The 32TB drive matches the capacity of Seagate’s 32TB heat-assisted magnetic recording HAMR drive, which it said it was shipping “for revenue” in July 2023. Unlike Western Digital, Seagate uses a conventional 10-platter design, so WD has an advantage in that area, but is trailing behind Seagate in adopting HAMR. According to Anandtech, WD has said it’ll adopt HAMR shortly with an eye toward 40TB to 50TB drives.
Toshiba is still a major player in the hard drive world, and it announced earlier this year that it was also working on 32TB and 30TB hard drives. As of this writing, both Seagate and WD now offer these two capacities as their maximum, so we’ll see if Toshiba joins the party at some point. For its part, Seagate is expected to use its existing HAMR platform to produce a 36TB drive followed by a 40TB HAMR drive, then eventually 50TB. The company previously said it aimed to hit 100TB by 2025, but that seems a bit optimistic.