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How to innovate data storage architecture in the AI era? Western Digital announces roadmap at WAIC
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Source: zhidx.com
Zhixi Author | ZeR0 Editor | Mo Ying Zhixi reported on July 21 that during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC 2026, Western Digital participated in the exhibition and held special sub-forums to comprehensively demonstrate how storage infrastructure supports the large-scale development of AI. How data is stored, managed and retained for a long time has become a key factor in determining whether AI can achieve sustainable, cost-effective and large-scale development. At the booth, Western Digital demonstrated two industry-first advanced HDD innovations: high-bandwidth hard drive technology and dual-pivot hard drive technology, as well as HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording), ePMR (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording) and UltraSMR technologies, and demonstrated how these technologies complement its platform product portfolio and are purpose-built to meet the needs of large-scale AI infrastructure. Among them, high-bandwidth hard disk technology uses multiple heads to read and write on multiple tracks simultaneously, which can provide up to 2 times the bandwidth of traditional HDD without increasing power consumption. This technology has a clear expansion path and can achieve bandwidth gains of up to 8 times in the future. It has been delivered to customers for verification. Dual-pivot technology adds a second set of independently operating actuators on an independent pivot, providing up to 2x sequential IO performance gain within a 3.5-inch drive. This is different from previous dual-actuator designs that sacrificed capacity and required customers to significantly modify the software. Dual-pivot technology increases the overall capacity by narrowing the distance between disks and carrying more disks on a single hard drive. Through the combination of these technologies, Western Digital will increase the overall sequential IO performance of hard drives to 4 times. While achieving 100TB HDD, it can still maintain the relative IO rate per TB that customers currently enjoy. This effectively reduces the need for customers to add SSD deployments or reconstruct the service architecture during capacity expansion. Western Digital also exhibited a variety of Ultrastar enterprise-class HDD solutions for large-scale data storage environments, including 40TB and 34TB Ultrastar DC HC6100 data center UltraSMR hard drives, 30TB and 28TB