It looks like we will see a revolution in data storage. Western Digital announced new HDD drives that will offer huge capacity and instant access to data, combining the advantages of SSD with a much lower price.
Although in recent years it may have seemed that classic HDD drives were standing in the shadow of SSDs, Western Digital shows that “plates” have not said the last word. On the contrary – the upcoming changes may take 3.5-inch drives to a completely new level of performance and capacity. TechSpor described what will change and what it will mean in practice.
More heads = more speed
The basis of the new approach is the High Bandwidth Drive concept. Until now, the standard was a simple solution: one head serves one platter surface, and data is read or written sequentially. The new architecture breaks this pattern.
Western Digital allows multiple heads to work in parallel on different tracks at the same time. The manufacturer claims that it will allow you to obtain 2x higher input/output (I/O) throughput from the very beginning, and ultimately even 8x higher transfer compared to today’s HDDs.
Importantly, this is not just a vision from the laboratory – prototypes have already been delivered to selected test customers, which suggests that the technology is close to production implementation.
Dual Pivot – two heads are better than one
The second key innovation is Dual Pivot Technology, a completely redesigned actuator mechanism. Instead of one common pivot point, the disc receives two independent arms, each with its own pivot.
In the past, similar solutions meant sacrificing some capacity for performance. This time it is different – full capacity is maintained and efficiency increases. Dual Pivot alone gives about a 2x increase in performance, and in combination with multi-head read/write it means up to 4x greater I/O than in the currently best HDD drives.
100 TB in one disk and speeds like SSD?
It sounds like science fiction, but according to Western Digital, the end result could be very specific. 3.5-inch drives with capacities close to 100 TB, offering SSD-like access times – and at a much lower cost per terabyte. This is especially important for cloud computing and AI systems, where the amount of data is growing exponentially and the budget for building data centers is limited.
Dual Pivot Technology is expected to leave the laboratories and be tested by customers before the end of the decade, and commercial availability is planned around 2028. In other words: it is not the distant future, just a matter of a few years.
