The world’s largest hard drive maker has revealed that it is working to launch solid-state hard drives with truly gigantic capacity, up to 60TB, as early as next year.
During the recent third-quarter earnings conference call, Western Digital CEO David Goeckeler gave some details on the roadmap for its growing SSD business. According to Goeckeler, Western Digital’s enterprise customers are demanding much higher capacity SSDs to meet the ever-increasing storage demands of AI, big data analytics and other data-intensive workloads.
Specifically, he said many customers are asking for SSD models in the “30 and 60 terabyte capacity spots.” While Western Digital’s current flagship data center SSD is the 30.72TB SN640, Goeckeler therefore confirmed that the company will soon launch even higher capacity models, up to 60 TB.
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What do we know about Western Digital’s next 60TB SSD?
Exact details have not yet been released, but the CEO indicated that WD “ increased the capacity and carried out a qualification on this subject ” with customers. For information, A 60TB SSD provides enough flash memory to hold approximately 12,000 Blu-ray movies or millions of hours of ultra-high definition video.
This immense capacity packed into a single 2.5-inch drive could revolutionize the way data centers and cloud service providers configure their infrastructure.
On the subject of hard drives, the WD director also gave an update on the company’s efforts in HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology. HAMR technology promises to increase the density of hard drives up to 50-60 TB by using laser heating to store more data per magnetic disk platter. While Western Digital already markets 20TB hard drives using old PMR technology, MGoeckeler recalled that WD “ has been working on HAMR technology for some time” behind the scenes and hopes to bring higher capacity HAMR drives to market once the technology is fully qualified and ready “.