HeathenLab PieFedWestern Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond
veeewww.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western…
Because nothing says “fun” quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.
Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives’ evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.
Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company’s proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.
We’ve come a long way:
That was my first USB thumb drive.
IIRC that was 5 mb. It weighed about 2000 lbs
Fee-fi-fo-fum.
Whats the point when the prices for 4-8TB disks are stable the last 5 years? (I think that they are getting higher even…)
The point is the need for more and more data storage is never going to stop.
Yep. It’s absurd. Who spends that much on a 4TB?
The point is that 8TB are too small, and not enough for my anime.
If the price per TB is stable you just buy 2 or 3 disks. It used to be that you buy one disk because by the time you needed more space the price per TB would be dropped a lot (halved even).
My NAS has a limited number of bays, so buying more low-storage disks isn’t a great option.
Buy a SAS adapter and put them in an external storage rack.
“Anime”
Retaining that much detail on tentacles takes some drive space
See the problem is the details keep getting higher res, but we also never stopped to ask if 32 tentacles was too much…
Does the increased density mean that the speed also goes up? It would be nice if a 7200 RPM drive could finally saturate SATA3 bandwidth.
Linear density could also boost throughout. Multiple actuators also exist.
No.
If you were to ask me a year ago I’d tell you that HDD’s would be the next dead storage medium but now SSD’s cost more then I spent on my rig and HDD’s are pushing 140 TB’s
I just looked up prices for servers we sell out work.
They saw a price increase of 47%.
The SSDs and RAM saw an increase of about 25% and ~150% respectively.
Absolutely ludicrous and BS (ironically both the price and available stock increased. So it’s just preying on the market instead of an actual shortage lol)
I wonder if tapes make any sort of ‘comeback’ to the consumer market.
And how much will that cost? Sounds like something fantastic for my Jellyfin server. I’ll have all the 4k HDR I can get my hands on.
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it 😭
Who’s Barry Badrinath?
Maybe I can. The only thing you know about me is my username 😂
Going by the usual trends of $20+/tb, I’d say. fuckin expensive
For now anyway, it used to be $20+/gb. I’ll settle for flooding the market with refurbished 16+tb drives.
Very cheap. Just kidding. Fuck that shit
I would not put 130TB on any one piece of hardware, because when it fails, it will be a very sad day.
This hardware is for those who are storing EB of data.
Don’t even mention it. I have real world experience in that area 😂
That’s why this is perfect for a distributed array or as a data mass grave.
You don’t really store anything in there that is needed often.
Guess why (deep-)archive S3 is so much cheaper than hot S3 storage.
That’s a reason why.
Okay. I want total honesty here. How many of you could actually fill that thing up?
Archive.org, Anna’s archive, Jan 6 footage, Epstein files, there’s plenty to back up.
With useful stuff? Never. With random bullshit I think might be useful some day if only I find the time? Easy
No sweat, try mirroring a private tracker and you’ll very quickly run out lol. You need a couple of petabytes worth.
The real problem is the price of HDDs not going down due to lower production in light of SSDs.
I fully expect WD to drop this as some stupidly expensive SAS drives that almost no consumer will buy. They should at least apply the dual heads for speed tech so we get faster HDDs for the same price.
… or be able to backup it?
I have a lot of Linux IOSs which are definitely not VR porn. I have 200TB total including parity disks, and 150TB usable. It’s a real pain in the ass to maintain so many disks, and the power bill isn’t fun either. I’d love to replace them with fewer disks.
I remember Mac OS X having an issue with its mail app awhile back that would create massive log files continuously that would keep generating until they filled the entire drive. You would have to boot to a recovery partition or such because the OS partition wouldn’t have enough room to expand/boot and remove them and fix the issue.
Imagine having 130 terabytes of invisible log files
keep the OS partition like 4tb and make a separate partition for the pirated movies
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #72 for this comm, first seen 8th Feb 2026, 00:30] [[FAQ](http://decronym.xyz/)] [[Full list](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/selfhosted@lemmy_world)] [[Contact](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A)] [Source code]
In a pinch the drive can also double as a flywheel battery.
Ya hmar
Yalla