this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24650125

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.

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[–] FirmDistribution@lemmy.world 151 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era

Can somebody do anything with a normal consumer in mind these days? 😭

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 86 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they'll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world's governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We've already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and "AI" boom and soon to be bust. There's still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

[–] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 23 points 1 week ago

Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.

And don't forget the part where, whether they get a bailout or not, they'll still have to double the prices of everything to make up for all the money they lost on that stupid AI bubble exploding in their face (which all of us are somehow to blame for, obviously, which is why we have to pay them back for it)

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[–] mycodesucks@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (3 children)

No, and it's by design.

You're gonna lease a tablet and use cloud-based storage services and like it.

The dystopia is here.

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[–] myserverisdown@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

140 TB is a whole heck of a lot of movies and TV shows

[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's about the storage I have in my server right now - using 15 drives ☠️

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[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does data take up less room when it's being used by AI?

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Normal consumers can install jellyfin. At some point they'll make downloading a crime, they wouldn't hurt people to have a decent collection of stuff ready for that day.

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[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 46 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Okay cool, cool, so does this mean ridiculous data centers will use these things, and then can I get another 4TB RED for my NAS so I can fit my whole life on a mirrored total of 8TB without paying 8x what it's worth, please?

Thaaaaanks...

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Is there a Lemmy community for trading surplus hardware yet?

I have a pile of HDDs and servers that I no longer use. I've transitioned almost all mine to 20tb+. I might have 8 or 10 4tb REDs laying around. They're old, probably have thousands of power on hours in the smart data though.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 points 6 days ago

Right on!

I don't know if there's a hardware trading community yet. I think one challenge is simply how lemmy seems to aim for more general anonymity than reddit, and the DM system isn't really used to my understanding. (Except by "that fediverse girl" LOL)

Establishing a sense of reasonable trustworthiness to thwart bad actors might take some work.

[–] yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Are you in Europe by any chance? :)

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[–] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (4 children)

8TB? That’s my ideal RAM configuration lol. ;-)

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[–] Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world 44 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I just hope smaller sized drives become cheaper. The word "hope" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

Ten years from now...

Amazon search: "hard drive"

Result: 4TB $198

[–] Zozano@aussie.zone 12 points 1 week ago
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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Holy fuck can you imagine how long it would take to re-stripe a failed drive in a z2 array 😭

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

When you are running a server just to store files (a NAS) you generally set it up so multiple physical hard disks are joined together into an array so if one fails, none of the data is lost. You can replace a failed drive by taking it out and putting in a new working drive and then the system has to copy all of the data over from the other drives. This process can take many hours to run even with the 10-20 TB drive you get today, so doing the same thing with 140 TB drive would take days.

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 14 points 1 week ago

@SmoothLiquidation @Telorand They also claim up to 8x speed improvements with HAMR. Obviously that remains to be seen, but if they could roughly match capacity improvements, that would keep restriping in the same ballpark.

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[–] Dremor@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

My Z2 had à drive failure recently, with 4To drives. Took me almost 3 days to re-silver the array 😅. fortunately had a hot spare setup, so it started as soon as it failed, but now a second drive is showing signs of failing soon, so I had to pay the AI tax (168€) to get one asap (arriving Monday), as well as a second one, cheaper (around 120€), but which won't arrive until the end of April.

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (5 children)

This would be a bitch to have to rebuild in a raid array. At some point a drive can get TOO big. And this is looking to cross that line.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

At some point a drive can get TOO big

I was thinking the same. I would hate to toast a 140 TB drive. I think I'd just sit right down and cry. I'll stick with my 10 TB drives.

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

This is not meant for human beings. A creature that needs over 140 TB of storage in a single device can definitely afford to run them in some distributed redundancy scheme with hot swaps and just shred failed units. We know they're not worried about being wasteful.

[–] thejml@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Rebuild time is the big problem with this in a RAID Array. The interface is too slow and you risk losing more drives in the array before the rebuild completes.

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Realistically, is that a factor for a Microsoft-sized company, though? I'd be shocked if they only had a single layer of redundancy. Whatever they store is probably replicated between high-availability hosts and datacenters several times, to the point where losing an entire RAID array (or whatever media redundancy scheme they use) is just a small inconvenience.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It doesn't really matter, the current limitations are not so much data density at rest, but getting the data in and out at a useful speed. We breached the capacity barrier long ago with disk arrays.

SATA will no longer be improved, we now need u.2 designs for data transport that are designed for storage. This exists, but needs to filter down through industrial application to get to us plebs.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

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[–] Ferroto@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

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[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As a result, will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

Um thanks but tell us about 2026?

[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If you have to ask, you can't afford it 😭

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[–] recklessengagement@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Going by the usual trends of $20+/tb, I'd say. fuckin expensive

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Probably still with only 1 year warranty...

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 week ago

And if it breaks at 10 months and they take another 2 to send your replacement back, well, they no longer need to send one that actually works this time either

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread #72 for this comm, first seen 8th Feb 2026, 00:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] nuko147@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Whats the point when the prices for 4-8TB disks are stable the last 5 years? (I think that they are getting higher even...)

[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 11 points 1 week ago

The point is the need for more and more data storage is never going to stop.

[–] sefra1@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The point is that 8TB are too small, and not enough for my anime.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] pound_heap@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] zorflieg@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

I wonder why current consumer HDD's don't have NVME connectors on them. Like I know speeding up the bus isn't going to make the spinning rust access faster but the cache ram would probably benefit from not being capped at 550MBps

[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Question: Are failures due to issues on a specific platter? Meaning, could a ZRAID theoretically use specific platters as a way to replicate data and not require 140TB of resilvering on a failure?

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

@Fmstrat @veeesix Since there's two very diffrent questions there.. The first, "where do the failures happen?": anywhere. It could be the controller dying (in which case the platters themselves are fine if you replace the board, but otherwise the whole thing is toast). It could be the head breaking. It could be issues with a specific platter. It could be something that affects _all_ the platters (like dust getting inside the sealed area). So basically, it very much depends.

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[–] Alpha71@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Okay. I want total honesty here. How many of you could actually fill that thing up?

[–] alekwithak@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago

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

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