Western Digital has outlined its future hard disk drive technology roadmap and revealed plans to adopt heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for its HDDs beginning in late 2026. HAMR will enable the company to build 80TB–100TB HDDs by 2030.

Western Digital's first HAMR-based HDDs will be introduced in 2026, with a 36TB capacity for conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and a 44TB capacity for shingled UltraSMR recording. The company expects these drives to be qualified by its customers among cloud data center providers by late 2026, which is when Western Digital will begin its volume production. The company plans to commence volume shipments of its HAMR drives in the first half of 2027.

Right now, two CSPs are already test-driving Western Digital's HAMR-based HDDs, though the company declines to disclose their capacity and whether they are used in the CMR or SMR versions.

Western Digital expects its HDDs featuring HAMR technology to evolve over the years. For now, the company envisions 80TB CMR HDDs and 100TB UltraSMR drives around 2030. That evolution will not be enabled by HAMR alone but also by the company's other technologies, including OptiNAND, an increased number of platters, and mechanical improvements. By the end of the decade, there will be HDDs that can store more than twice as much data as current hard drives.

It is worth noting that Western Digital's path to HAMR has been convoluted, to say the least. Energy-assisted magnetic recording has been discussed for years, but Seagate and Western Digital only began discussing its commercialization in the mid-2010s. While Seagate has been a strong supporter of HAMR, Western Digital publicly committed to microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2017. However, Western Digital then made significant advancements with its write heads and ultimately developed ePMR 2 technology, which enables the company's leading-edge 26TB CMR and 32TB UltraSMR HDDs.