Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs
3 62Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.
The vertical laser, developed over six years and already working in WD's labs, emits light straight down onto the disk rather than from the edge, delivering more thermal energy while occupying less vertical space -- enabling areal densities up to 10 TB per platter, up from today's 4 TB, and room for additional platters in the same enclosure. WD's first commercial HAMR drives arrive in late 2026 at 40-44 TB on an 11-platter design, ramping into volume production in 2027. A 12-platter platform follows in 2028 at 60 TB, and WD expects to hit 100 TB by around 2030.
3 comments
I feel like that's too big (Score: 5, Funny)
by suutar ( 1860506 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @12:20PM (#65970598)
that's going to take _forever_ to scan for corruption
Re:I feel like that's too big (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @01:17PM (#65970724)
Well let's see...
Today they offer 32TB drives on SATA 6gpbs... If that is 'acceptable' then reading the entire drive takes at least 18 hours or so in theory. If same interface, then you'd be limited to 78 hours...
But wait, there's been talk about spinning platters being upgraded to NVME interfaces. Largely because "why accommodate spinning drives with a separate interface", but if this comes in, and could credibly in that timeframe have NVMe with PCIe 6, then the total drive read time could be reduced to about 90 minutes, in theory.
So in theory, such a drive with a credible storage interface could push this in a more reasonable time period. Historically spinning platters seek performance made the nvme overkill, but streaming performance with that many platters and that density may remedy the 'drive too big' problem. Of course, in the *consumer* market this means that systems would have to start accommodating that sort of connectivity... Of course, in the timeframe perhaps the drives would just use USB to connect, and could credibly connect at 120Gbps, which would mean about 180 minutes of time to read the full time...
In short, it's time to move to PCIe connectivity to tame these capacities...
Laser Lifetime (Score: 5, Insightful)
by weirdow ( 9298 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @12:25PM (#65970612)
One has to wonder how long the lasers will last, and when they finally fail, will the drive still be usable as a Read Only drive .