You've Heard of High Bandwidth Memory, Now Get Ready For High Bandwidth Hard Drives

Western Digital is introducing a couple of new technologies, dubbed "High Bandwidth Drive" and "Dual Pivot", that will significantly boost the performance of hard drives. According to Western Digital, the company expects up to a 4x combined total boost to sequential I/O, but even higher increases are possible further out into the future.

High Bandwidth Drive Technology "enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks" and Dual Pivot Technology "adds a second set of independently operating actuators on a separate pivot and will deliver up to 2x sequential I/O gain within a 3.5-inch drive."


In the long-term, Western Digital expects HB Drive Technology to "scale up to 8x" bandwidth, and drives employing both High Bandwidth Drive Technology and Dual Pivot Technology are expected to become available in 2028. High Bandwidth-only Drives are already available to some customers.

In its press release, Western Digital posits these advancements in high-speed hard drives are a way to target the AI market and reduce costs associated with increased NAND flash demand. The comparatively low cost of high capacity HDD storage along with these advancements should be attractive to the AI and enterprise markets, and may even have promise on consumer or workstation PCs. Video creators, for example, would benefit from a lower-cost alternative to NVMe SSDs for dealing with ultra HD resolution footage.


There's no indication that Western Digital is will target the consumer market with this technology, but it is likely to trickle down in time. If this technology proves sufficient for the demands of the AI industry, it could be a major cost-cutter, and potentially reduce NAND demand. Western Digital also touted upcoming "power-optimized HDDs" for 2027 that reduce power consumption "while maintaining a sub-second access storage tier with the same 3.5-inch form factor" customers use today. The company also believes a path to 100TB+ HDDs is possible via HAMR innovations by 2029. For now, the world's highest capacity 40TB UltraSMR ePMR HDD is in qualification with a planned launch in the latter half of this year, and HAMHR HDDs are expected to ramp production in 2027.