How much faster could Western Digital's new hard drives be?

Western Digital's new hard drive designs, combining High Bandwidth Drive Technology and Dual Pivot Technology, are expected to increase performance by up to eight times.

What new technologies are Western Digital using for faster hard drives?

Western Digital is using High Bandwidth Drive Technology with secondary read and write heads and Dual Pivot Technology with an additional independent actuator to achieve higher bandwidth and sequential I/O performance.

Who will benefit from Western Digital's enhanced hard drive performance?

This advancement is significant for those storing huge libraries of photos and videos, enterprise and business servers, workstations, and data centers, offering a competitive option for cheap, QLC NAND-based SSDs.

Home / Technology / WD's New HDDs: 8x Faster, Rivaling SSDs?

WD's New HDDs: 8x Faster, Rivaling SSDs?

5 Feb

Summary

Western Digital's new hard drives could boost speeds up to eight times.
New designs add secondary heads and actuators for higher bandwidth.
This tech targets bulk storage, not random access performance.

WD's New HDDs: 8x Faster, Rivaling SSDs?

Western Digital has unveiled innovative new hard drive designs poised to dramatically increase storage performance. The company's High Bandwidth Drive Technology (HBDT) and Dual Pivot Technology aim to significantly boost data transfer rates.

HBDT incorporates secondary read/write heads, while Dual Pivot Technology adds an independent actuator. Individually, these can double bandwidth compared to conventional drives.

Western Digital's tests suggest combining these technologies could achieve throughput from 300MB/s to 1.2GB/s, a fourfold increase. Further development is expected to potentially multiply performance by up to eight times.

This leap in sustained sequential read and write speeds would place these advanced hard drives close to the performance of entry-level PCIe 3 SSDs. However, random access performance will still lag significantly behind modern SSDs.

The enhanced hard drives are primarily targeted at applications requiring massive storage, such as large photo and video libraries, enterprise servers, workstations, and data centers. Western Digital views this technology as a competitive alternative to cheaper QLC NAND-based SSDs for bulk storage solutions.

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