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Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 5 months ago by veeesix@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24650125

Because nothing says "fun" quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.

Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives' evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company's proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.

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[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 3 points 5 months ago

It depends. For anything going into space, especially microsats, the biggest concerns are space, weight, and power. SSDs are better at all of those, plus they don't have any gyroscopic effects, and they're much less susceptible to vibrations (e.g. the absolute earthquake at liftoff and the sudden jolts during each rocket stage). They are more susceptible to high-energy particles, but they can be hardened through shielding and parity/redundancy.

For a datacenter on Mars, you're less concerned with SWaP, only as much as you need to be to get it there as cargo. Obviously that means space and weight are still concerns, but not power.

The other factor with using fewer larger drives is that when you have a failure, you lose a lot more data, and any recovery takes longer.

this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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