Tag: storage

Are we finally going to see 100TB+ hard drives?

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

In a few years, hard drives could cross the 100 TB barrier, but at what cost?

Western Digital, now rebranded as WD, lifted the veil on a roadmap that it hopes will shatter the 100 terabyte storage barrier by 2029. Announced at its Innovation Day 2026, the strategy leverages a dual-path approach using both Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Enhanced Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR) to meet the growing demands of AI.

With 40TB UltraSMR drives already entering customer qualification and a clear engineering path to 100TB+, the industry is finally moving past the incremental gains of the last decade toward a future where massive, high-performance capacity is no longer the bottleneck of innovation.

The next step, 40 TB UltraSMR hard drives, are actually already being tested by two customers according to WD. The company plans to mass produce the hard drives in the second half of 2026.

Engineers run test on the Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) drive technology, which could see first hard drives on the market in 2027.

WD plans to extend Energy-assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR) drives to 60 TB and scale HAMR to 100 TB by 2029. Both types of drives are built on common architecture according to WD, which enables “greater manufacturing efficiencies, yields, and a smoother customer product transition”.

The real kicker is that WD says that two new technologies that improve HDD performance significantly and support “workloads previously considered flash-only”.

The company writes:

  • High Bandwidth Drive Technology enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks delivering up to 2x the bandwidth of conventional HDDs without power penalties. The technology has a clear path to scale up to 8x bandwidth gains and is already in customer hands for validation.
  • Dual Pivot Technology adds a second set of independently operating actuators on a separate pivot and will deliver up to 2x sequential IO gain within a 3.5-inch drive. This differs from previous dual actuator designs that sacrificed capacity and required extensive customer software changes. Dual Pivot enables reduced spacing between disks, allowing for more platters per drive and higher overall capacity.

WD says that the technologies combined increase sequential IO to 4x overall. The company expects that HDDs with Dual Pivot Technology will become available in 2028.

Closing Words

These drives are largely built for use in data centers and not at home. However, it is likely that consumers will also benefit from an increase in storage. WD did not reveal pricing information but it is clear that these drives won’t be cheap and probably too expensive for the majority of home users out there.

Display the power on hours and other hard drive stats on Windows

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

All hard drives have a limited lifespan. It does not really matter if you use Solid State Drives or platter-based drives. Eventually, they will fail. It is therefore important to keep an eye on the status of hard drives. This gives you enough time to migrate the data to a new hard drive to avoid disaster.

Looking up hard drive usage information is also useful in other scenarios. Say you want to sell a hard drive. Buyers may want to know for how long the hard drive was used and how much writes it had. The latter is important for Solid State Drives, which support a limited number of writes.

One of the best applications for the job is Crystal Disk Info. The free software for Windows is easy to use. It displays internal hard drive data courtesy of S.M.A.R.T. — Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology — of hard drives.

S.M.A.R.T.’s primary purpose is to monitor and report drive reliability data. CrystalDiskInfo retrieves the information and displays them in its interface for each connected hard drive.

CrystalDiskInfo

CrystalDiskInfo hard drive information

You can download the latest version of CrystalDiskInfo from the developer’s website. Run the program after installation. It displays each hard drive in a tab in its interface.

Data of the primary hard drive is displayed automatically. Click on other hard drives to display their data in the interface.

Check the top right corner to get “total host reads”, “total host writes”, Total NAND writes”, “power on count” and “power on hours” information. These should give you a good view of the utilization of the drive.

Note that the information is slightly different for platter-based drives. These display the rotation rate, which is the speed more or less, as well as power on count and power on hours.

External hard drive information

Additional information about the drive is displayed on the left side. You find the features that it supports there as well as the current transfer mode. This can also be useful to determine issues, e.g., if a drive is slow.

The app displays all S.M.A.R.T. values in a table below. Some, like the write error rate, temperature, or reallocated sectors count, may also be useful.

The current and worst values are displayed, as well as potential thresholds.

Closing Words

CrystalDiskInfo is a great app when it comes to hard drive information. It is free and easy to use. It is a good idea to check S.M.A.R.T. values regularly to detect failing hard drives as early as possible.

Now You: do you monitor S.M.A.R.T. values of hard drives?