The world’s largest HDD company aims to launch a massive 60TB SSD in 2024 – WD CEO talks about solid-state roadmap as he reveals enterprise customers want much larger capacities, fast
During Western Digital’s recent Q3 call, CEO David Goeckeler revealed that the ever-growing need for higher capacity and faster data access from customers around the world is driving the company to expand its solid-state capabilities.
The company posted a profitable quarter, with revenue rising above expectations to $3.46 billion, up 29% year over year. The company managed to reverse a series of losses and report a profit of $135 million. This performance is in stark contrast to rival Seagate, which posted an 11% year-over-year revenue decline to $1.66 billion.
Goeckeler underlined that Western Digital’s improved financial performance was the result of the company’s efforts to offer a more diversified product range. He also said that WD is committed to delivering larger SSD capacities due to the growing demand for AI-related applications. He said customers βwant them (SSDs) in much larger capacity points, 30 and 60 terabyte capacity points.β
HAMR HDD technology
Reporting on the third quarter results, Blocks and files wrote βWD currently offers DC SN640 TLC PCIe gen 3 SSDs with capacities up to 30.72 TB and PCIe gen 4 SN650 and 655 drives with 15.36 TB. We now expect WD to announce 60TB SSDs later this year.β
Without going into details about the exact capabilities being worked on, Goeckeler said the company was expanding the size of the drives in line with what customers demanded. He stated that WD βis ββincreasing capacity and is going through a qualification about it. So we are in that process with customers.β
He also discussed hard disk recording (HAMR) technology, including the issues surrounding it, saying: βWe have been working on HAMR for quite some time. We understand HAMR extremely well. We understand all the issues with HAMR and what it takes to get it qualified. Obviously we do all that behind the scenes because we have a product portfolio with the best TCO we can offer on the market today, and we can do that up to 40 terabytes.β Western Digital’s rival Seagate recently announced the results of an experimental test showing that one of its hard drives using HAMR was able to run for more than 6,000 hours continuously.