Western Digital Shows Path To HAMR At Investor Day

Western Digital had an investor day meeting on February 12 where the company discussed its status and strategy as a hard disk drive company with the separation of SanDisk as a separate company focused on NAND Flash and SSDs. This separation is expected to be completed on February 21, 2025.

WDC CEO Irving Tan said that WDC remains a trusted partner to the world’s largest hyperscalers, OEMs and other enterprise digital storage users. In addition to continuing promotion of the company’s ePMR conventional magnetic recording, CMR, and UltraSMR, shingled magnetic recording, technology, he also talked about future HDD technologies, including heat assisted magnetic recording, HAMR.

In Tan’s presentation, WDC referred to the 2024-2028 IDC Global DataSphere Forecast of 394ZB of data generated annually by 2028 and that installed cloud storage will have a CAGR of 23%, mostly growing at the expense of endpoint data storage. In particular, nearline HDD growth over this period is estimated at 23% CAGR, with enterprise SSD CAGR of 24% and tape at 11% CAGR.

AI applications using text, images and video for training will require massive data lakes of cost-effective storage, driving an uplift in data center digital storage demand with an expected 131% uplift from 2024 through 2028 in Nearline HDD storage shipments to support AI workloads. This is on top of a 15% CAGR of nearline HDD storage capacity to support more conventional computing applications.

WDC, and particularly with the acquisition of HGST with the innovative history of IBM, has been pursuing advances in HDD technology for many years. The more recent advances in helium sealed HDD as well as ePMR, triple stage actuators, OptiNAND and UltraSMR HDD are shown below.

Tan also publicly announced WDC’s development of HAMR HDDs, shown in the image below. WDC said that it is taking a measured approach to introducing HAMR HDDs, which it projects could enable HDDs with up to 100TB storage capacities.

WDC says that the 20% storage capacity uplift with UltraSMR from CMR hard disk drives will also work with SMR HAMR HDDs. WDC has focused on shingled hard disk drives for data center applications. The company says that its introduction of HAMR HDDs will be accelerated by working with their data center companies and that hyperscale testing of WDC HAMR HDDs has begun and that going forward, the majority of the company’s budget and Capex will be focused on supporting the company’s transition from ePMR to HAMR products.

WDC said that with its move to HAMR and other advanced technology it will maintain a 6X lower cost per TB of data than flash memory from 2024 through 2030. It also said that overall upfront costs and operating costs for HDDs is 3.6X smaller than for flash memory based storage in a standard hyperscale datacenter.

In addition to the announcements of WDC’s move to create HAMR HDDs, the company is also exploring new growth opportunities with HDD developments as well as possible AI compute and DNA and optical storage technologies. The company also continues its storage systems business, including HDD, flash and networking products as shown below.

Overall WDC projects that its revenues could grow to $22.6B by CY28 from $13.3B in CY24 with 14% of this growth due to an AI storage uplift and 6% of this growth from existing applications. The growth of WDC’s projected nearline HDD EB shipments and revenue are shown below.

Western Digital had its first investor day focusing on its current activities and plans going forward as a HDD company. HAMR and other advanced technology HDDs will likely be in volume manufacturing starting in 2026.