In an interaction with CRN India, Owais Mohammed, Sales Director India, Middle East, and Africa, Western Digital, talks about the company’s renewed focus on HDDs and how its innovative technologies are not helping customers meet high-density storage needs but also supporting the growing demands of AI workloads.
Now that Western Digital has completed its separation, how is the renewed strategic focus on HDDs shaping the company’s long-term growth plans?
We are thrilled by the expanding opportunities across India and global markets. As businesses accelerate digital transformation and adopt AI, the volume of data needed, generated and being stored is surging. This is driving a sharp increase in demand for scalable, high-capacity infrastructure that can support business expansion and enable AI workloads. After all, AI’s potential is deeply rooted in the quality and volume of data it draws from—most of which continues to be stored on HDDs.
Western Digital, with its legacy of innovation and leadership in hard drive technology, is well-equipped to meet this growing demand. We continue to deliver reliable, high-density storage solutions optimised for cloud and enterprise environments. Our offerings are designed to address critical customer needs around scalability, cost efficiency, performance and sustainability.
As the industry pivots to meet these evolving data needs, hard drives remain unmatched when it comes to storing massive datasets at scale with cost efficiency and durability.
As we are now once again fully focussed on pioneering HDD technology, it is our mission
to deliver reliable, scalable storage innovations to our partners in the ever-evolving data
economy in both developed and emerging markets with confidence.
With AI becoming a major data driver globally, how is Western Digital aligning its HDD roadmap to meet this exponential storage demand?
As cloud adoption and AI innovation continue to accelerate across industries, from generative models to autonomous technologies, the demand for hard disk drives has never been more critical. AI is fundamentally fueled by unstructured data, and unstructured data predominantly resides on hard drives. This makes hard drives an indispensable part of the AI infrastructure ecosystem.
To support the growing demands of AI workloads, we are advancing our cutting-edge technologies. UltraSMR, ePMR, and our proprietary OptiNAND innovations are already powering drives up to 32TB. Further capacity points of up to 44TB are expected by 2026, which are ideal for handling massive training datasets, synthetic data generation, and inference outcomes. Looking further ahead, our HAMR roadmap is on track to deliver drives with up to 100TB per HDD by 2030. These technologies are being developed in parallel, ensuring that our customers can adopt HAMR when it aligns best with their economic and operational needs.
At Western Digital, we view storage as more than just capacity—it’s about delivering meaningful value through scalable, dependable, and sustainable solutions in a world where data volumes are doubling every two years. As India and other emerging economies ramp up their AI infrastructure, we are proud that our solutions serve as the foundation for the innovations of today and tomorrow.
Can you elaborate on how Western Digital’s ePMR and UltraSMR technologies are helping customers meet high-density storage needs?
Western Digital’s legacy of continuous HDD technology innovation underscores its unwavering commitment to delivering best-in-class storage solutions, both for today’s needs and the demands of the future.
Years of R&D have culminated in groundbreaking advancements such as energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR). Developed in tandem with OptiNAND, ePMR increases areal density by applying energy during the write process, allowing data bits to be placed closer together with reduced jitter, addressing the challenge of maximising capacity without compromising reliability or performance. OptiNAND, which integrates an embedded flash chip into traditional HDD architecture, enhances drive capabilities by enabling faster write speeds, improved metadata management, and higher areal density. The result is greater efficiency for data-intensive workloads across enterprise and cloud environments.
Building on these advancements, Western Digital’s introduction of UltraSMR further elevates its leadership in shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. UltraSMR is engineered to deliver up to 20% more capacity than conventional CMR drives by optimising data formats and architecture. This next-generation technology allows cloud service providers and hyperscale data centers to scale faster and more cost-effectively, which is again ideal for AI training, large-scale backups, video archives, and other data-heavy workloads. By maximising storage within the same physical footprint, UltraSMR drives not only reduce the cost per terabyte but also enhance overall operational efficiency.
Western Digital’s latest generation of high-capacity HDDs exemplifies a strategic fusion of proven engineering and cutting-edge innovation. These continuous higher-capacity drive innovations empower cloud providers, enterprises, and data centers to scale storage without expanding physical infrastructure. By achieving higher storage density within the same footprint, organisations can avoid additional capital expenditure, while also maintaining power and cooling requirements within existing operational thresholds, thus maximising return on investment and optimizing total cost of ownership.
Can you share how technologies like UltraSMR and HAMR are helping customers scale storage efficiently?
As we enter a new era defined by AI and data-driven innovation, the demand for higher capacity storage solutions is accelerating. At Western Digital, we are innovating with intent-developing technologies that align with our customers’ evolving needs at exactly the right time. One such innovation is HAMR, Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, as a key enabler, empowering our customers to scale even further, truly innovating at the right time to meet tomorrow’s demands.
Our approach to HAMR is built on a legacy of successful technology transition, such as the introduction of helium-filled drives. By advancing ePMR, UltraSMR, and HAMR technologies simultaneously, we are providing customers with the flexibility to adopt HAMR when it becomes the most economical for them. Whether leveraging ePMR or transitioning to HAMR, our focus remains on delivering the highest capacity with the best total cost of ownership (TCO) in a scalable and predictable way. We anticipate that the economic benefits of transitioning to HAMR will become compelling at the 40TB+ capacity level, particularly at scale.
How does Western Digital foster a culture of innovation and engineering excellence across its global teams?
At Western Digital, innovation is more than just a function, it’s a mindset embedded in our DNA. We have built a culture of engineering excellence by providing global teams with cutting-edge tools, continuous learning, and the freedom to explore bold ideas. Our collaborative development and engineering ecosystem spans seven global centers, powered by 275+ PhDs and over 4,500 patents, including 36 innovation entries from our India facility.
Innovation is not only about breakthroughs, its about shared ideas and meaningful impacts. This is why we are proud to have initiatives like She Invents, a mentoring program for women in tech to refine and patent their ideas.
Quality is treated as a fundamental currency, earning trust, which in turn drives growth. Our world-class operational capabilities driven by vertical integration and disciplined capacity management ensure that we deliver with quality and scale while keeping our unwavering focus on ethics, sustainability, and governance. This culture ensures we are not just keeping up with the pace of change, we are setting it. For our customers, that translates into quality solutions, on-time delivery, and enduring value.
What broader storage trends is Western Digital keeping an eye on that could shape the future of data infrastructure in India?
Western Digital is closely monitoring numerous storage trends and emerging technologies which are expected to shape the future of data infrastructure, particularly in fast-growing digital economies like India. Here are a few trends:
AIStorage Optimisation: With the rapid adoption of AI and machine learning, storage systems are evolving to manage massive datasets with high velocity and complexity. This trend calls for flexible storage architectures, particularly disaggregated storage, which decouple compute, storage, and networking to optimise data access, performance, and analytics for AI workloads.
Sustainability & Energy Efficiency: With ESG imperatives becoming central, Western Digital is investing in developing storage technologies that reduce power consumption and carbon footprint, which is especially important for markets like India, where energy efficiency is a growing priority in data center planning.
Disaggregated Storage Architectures: To improve resource utilisation and future-proof infrastructure, organisations are increasingly shifting toward disaggregated storage. Western Digital is advancing open, scalable architectures that decouple compute from storage, thus offering better performance, agility, and total cost of ownership. This approach is especially critical in data-intensive environments like smart surveillance and AI-driven systems. As AI workloads increase, HDDs play a critical role in driving AI innovation by providing the size, durability, and efficiency required to store and access massive amounts of data.
Regardless of the trend, Western Digital remains committed to delivering the innovation, efficiency, and flexibility required to power the next generation of digital infrastructure across India and beyond.
