We're keeping a close eye on all the best SSD discounts and keeping a constantly updated list here. Buying SSDs is not as cheap as it used to be, but there are still savings to be had, especially on newer drives.

External factors, such as tariffs and geopolitical issues, along with chip shortages, are pushing prices upward. In fact, it appears that shortages driven by AI data centers could persist for several years. That means prices will go up significantly in the foreseeable future. Luckily, for now, there are discounts available on some SSD models.

As always, you'll need to stay alert when you're choosing SSDs, as not every drive is born equal and worthy of your money or a place of honor in your PC or PS5. We're constantly combing through the best deals across multiple retailers, selecting the best of them based on the in-depth knowledge we've gained from our thorough reviews, extensive benchmarks, and comprehensive historical price analysis.

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SSD Deals: What to Look For

• SATA or NVMe: SSDs either use the SATA or NVMe interface, with the latter being as much as six times faster (or more). All 2.5-inch drives are SATA, but M.2 drives could be either NVMe or SATA interface, though the latter is now rare. If you have a desktop or laptop that was built in the last 5 years, it almost certainly supports NVMe, which is faster. As SATA is old news, most of the best SSD deals are on NVMe drives.
• 2.5-inch or M.2: Most internal SSDs are either 2.5-inch or M.2 form factor. 2.5-inch drives connect to SATA ports and can replace old-school mechanical hard drives. M.2 drives look like RAM sticks and plug into dedicated M.2 ports. You won't find that many deals on 2.5-inch drives, but they can be useful for bulk storage, as many motherboards have a ton of SATA ports but only two M.2 slots.
• PCIe 3, 4, or 5: If you're buying an NVMe SSD, you can choose among PCIe 3, 4, or 5 interfaces with speeds increasing from a maximum of around 3,500 MBps sequential reads and writes to 8,000 MBps and 14,000 MBps. At this point, PCIe 4 drives are mainstream and offer the best value. PCIe 5 drives are extraordinarily expensive, require a newer-gen platform that supports them, and also generate a fair amount of heat. We're seeing the best SSD deals on PCIe 4 drives, which is the best standard for most people.
• Capacity: Price increases have upended the market in recent months, so it's going to be tricky to find a decent 2TB NVMe drive for less than $140, with high-performance models going for even more. 4TB drives are an even worse proposition, costing $250+, with some reaching over $400. If you really need to save money, a decent 1TB drive can still be found for $70 or $80.

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Alongside memory, SSD pricing has been at an all-time high thanks to the ongoing AI-apocalypse. But it seems that we might finally see some respite as Prime Day approaches. Western Digital has cut the price of its popular WD Black SN7100 PCIe 4.0 SSD, with the 2TB storage variant dropping from $299.99 to $242.96 on Amazon, a significant discount of around 20%.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The WD Black SN7100 is a successor to the SN770, featuring Sandisk’s proprietary Polaris 3 controller and 218-layer TLC (BiCS8) flash. The lack of DRAM can degrade sustained performance during heavy, prolonged transfers. However, it supports HMB (Host Memory Buffer), which compensates for this by using a portion of system memory as cache.

We tested the SN7100 and found it capable of delivering sequential read speeds of up to 7,250 MB/s and write speeds of up to 6,900 MB/s, along with an above-average endurance rating of 1,400 TBW (terabytes written). It also offers excellent random read performance while consuming less power than most PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market.

This efficiency makes it particularly well-suited for battery-powered devices such as laptops and handheld gaming consoles. Lower power consumption also translates into lower operating temperatures, allowing the drive to run comfortably without an additional heatsink in most everyday workloads. The SN7100 is also compatible with the Sony PS5, delivering performance comparable to other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs while maintaining lower power consumption and temperatures.

If you're on the lookout for a speedy storage upgrade, the 2TB WD Black SN7100 at $242.96 is a solid deal, if not its lowest-ever price. Considering this SSD climbed as high as $400 at one point and was selling for around $300 last month, now seems like a good time to purchase.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

A class-action lawsuit was filed against nearly every major hard drive suspension assembly maker, alleging that said companies' price-fixing efforts resulted in higher drive prices for resellers and end users. Should the lawsuit succeed, U.S. resellers and end users who purchased hard drives or computers including them could be eligible for monetary compensation. This suit is a stateside counterpart to the 2019 Canadian class action covering the same matter.

The documents were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and name two groups of defendants, one related to TDK Corporation and the other to NHK Spring. The assemblies produced by these firms are reportedly found in 97% of worldwide HDDs, so it's reasonable enough to assume drives from all major HDD brands are covered by this lawsuit — to wit, Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.

There is no court date set, and the press release specifically mentions that there's no guarantee that the lawsuit will succeed. However, the case is a direct continuation of a 2019 antitrust lawsuit against the same suspension makers. Over in the northern lands, the Canadian courts have already certified the class action and rejected an appeal against it in 2022. While these facts don't guarantee a payout on either country, they're positive indicators nonetheless.

Suspension assemblies are one of the critical components in a hard drive, as they move the read-write head (the tip of the "needle" you see in hard drive internals), and must be spectacularly precise in both manufacturing and functionality, especially considering the magnetic density of contemporary hard drive platters. It's rather mesmerizing to watch them at work.

The price-fixing scheme allegedly ran from January 2003 to December 31, 2016, raising hard drive manufacturing prices, which were then passed on to customers. As with most class-action lawsuits, end users have the option to drop from the class action and pursue separate legal action against the suspension makers, or stay in it and hope for a cheque at the end of the proceedings. There's a dedicated website for anyone who wants to opt out, an action that can be taken until August 23, 2026.

Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital are the only remaining manufacturers of hard disk drives. They not only continue to produce these storage devices but are also actively advancing them as demand for HDDs rises again. While hard drives from these companies share many similarities, each relies on a different set of underlying technologies — distinct recording methods, actuator designs, platter materials, and magnetic alloys, among others — resulting in markedly different roadmaps. In this story, we examine these roadmaps and attempt to make sense of them.

The state of the HDD market

The amount of data that the world generates is higher than ever now that not only people, but also machines generate well over 400 million terabytes of data every single day, according to estimates made in 2024. Most of that data ends up in data centers, so Gartner predicts that data center storage capacity requirements will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5% between 2024 and 2029 and will eventually reach 3.19 zettabytes (3.19 million PB, 3.19 billion TB). While a significant portion of that data will be stored on 3D NAND-based solid-state drives, the lion's share will reside on hard disk drives, as HDDs can still offer lower per-TB cost than even the cheapest NAND memory.

Hard drives have been around for nearly 70 years, and over 220 companies have produced HDDs since they were introduced in 1956. In 2026, only three hard drive manufacturers — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — remain on the market, and their supply chains are largely integrated or consolidated, meaning that the industry has largely shrunk from where it used to be a decade ago. Nonetheless, the combination of per-TB cost, storage density, and storage performance that HDDs offer makes them competitive enough, particularly in AI and traditional data centers, which need to store plenty of data that must be accessed relatively quickly and therefore placed 'near online', or nearline.

In fact, over 60% of hard drives shipped today are nearline HDDs, according to Nidec, the world's largest supplier of HDD motors. The remaining circa 40% are consumer and enterprise NAS hard drives, video surveillance HDDs, desktop HDDs (a declining category), external drives, laptop drives (an almost extinct category), and legacy high-performance enterprise HDDs (Toshiba only).

Nidec estimates that 119 million HDDs were shipped in its FY2023 (ending on March 31, 2024), and 125 million hard drives were shipped in its FY2024 (ending March 31, 2025), an indication that unit sales of mechanical storage devices are stable and are growing due to demand from AI and traditional data centers.

Unit sales of HDDs increased in calendar 2025 compared to calendar 2024, according to reports from Hoya (the only maker of glass substrates for HDD platters) and Resonac (the largest independent supplier of HDD platters), though exact numbers are unknown.

"While 2.5-inch substrates declined as forecasted, 3.5-inch substrates achieved double-digit growth, resulting in overall steady performance," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "Current demand is exceptionally strong and is expected to increase further. Preparations to enhance our supply capacity are also underway."

The road to 100TB and beyond

All HDD makers have adopted energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies, though everyone uses different methods. Seagate is ahead of the pack with its HAMR-based 44TB drive, which is shipping to two leading cloud service providers (CSPs), whereas Toshiba and WD are trailing the leader with their FC-MAMR and ePMR/ePMR2 recording technologies, as they pursue deliberately more cautious strategies.

Note: HDD makers tend to list maximum drive capacities with shingled recording. To that end, even if the table does not explicitly list SMR, presume that range-topping HDDs with leading capacity use shingled recording tech, with all of its pros and cons.

Meanwhile, both Toshiba and WD plan to transition to HAMR in the coming years, though before that, they plan to perfect their HDD platforms and push their existing recording technologies to their absolute limits. Once everyone adopts heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that uses platters made of glass with granular FePt magnetic alloy, the development of their roadmaps will be more or less consistent and introduce HDDs with a circa 100TB capacity by around 2030 – 2031, though some roadmap slides are more optimistic, whereas others are more cautious.

Seagate: All-in on HAMR

All HDD makers tend to experiment with various recording technologies, platters, and heads. Just like others, Seagate has experimented with all kinds of EAMR methods, including microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), but publicly it bet everything on HAMR as the most capable one.

Before Seagate finally shipped its Mozaic 3+ Exos HDDs in Q1 2024, it spent over a decade evolving HAMR from lab demonstrations (FePt + laser writing) through prototype drives and hyperscaler trials. Starting from around 2016, the company repeatedly said 'next year' for high-volume HAMR-based HDD production, only to roll out the same statement the year after.

Between 2020 and 2023, Seagate's HAMR rollout ran into a series of well-known hiccups that repeatedly pushed back commercialization despite earlier aggressive timelines. The company had originally targeted volume shipments of 20TB HAMR drives around 2020, but persistent issues, such as near-field transducer (NFT) reliability, iron platinum (FePt) media durability under repeated heating, and manufacturing yield, slowed progress. These challenges made HAMR technically viable but difficult to produce at scale, which led to multiple delays and extended customer qualification cycles.

To solve these challenges, Seagate had to develop its 2^nd Generation HAMR platform, which it eventually named Mozaic 3+, which went into high-volume production in 2024. But now that Seagate has mastered everything that accompanies HAMR, it can introduce new capacity points, qualify them, and ramp up production of new HAMR-based HDDs fairly quickly. For example, the company is now shipping its 44TB Mozaic 4-based drives to select clients and plans to expand availability in 2027. Meanwhile, Seagate intends to start qualification shipments of 50TB HDDs featuring the next-generation Mozaic 5 platform in late 2027.

Following 50TB HDDs in 2028, 60 TB HDDs by 2029 – 2030, and plans for 80+ TB drives in 2031. With ~100TB HDDs, Seagate intends to adopt high-anisotropic ordered granular FePt (FePt L1₀ phase) magnetic alloy, which will give it a further boost to set new areal density records and ultimately produce HDDs with capacities beyond 100TB.

Toshiba: Stretching MAMR (almost) to the limit

Toshiba is the smallest of all HDD makers, so it has a very calculated strategy that is designed to address parts of the market that are not served by its rivals and to derisk everything as much as possible.

To that end, Toshiba's HDD roadmap is built around a conservative, step-by-step scaling strategy focused on flux-controlled microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) with some HAMR-based HDDs due in 2026 – 2027 being test vehicles, rather than high-volume products. The company's roadmap no longer lists microwave assisted switching microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAS-MAMR) it envisioned as an intermediate step between FC-MAMR and HAMR a few years ago.

For now, Toshiba has its M12-series 28TB FC-MAMR-based 11-platter drive with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and is sampling shingled FC-MAMR HDDs based on the same platform with 30TB – 34 TB capacities. The new M12 hard drives rely on glass platters, but with traditional cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy, which once again highlights Toshiba's step-by-step approach to adopting new technologies.

Looking forward, Toshiba's roadmap scales capacity primarily through more platters (up to 12), and continued FC-MAMR improvements targeting ~40TB drives around 2027. While the company intends to launch HAMR-based HDDs too, the 40TB capacity point will likely be limited to drives for select customers rather than true workhorses. More capacious HAMR-based HDDs are due late this decade.

In essence, Toshiba is taking a lower-risk, hybrid path: maximize MAMR and mechanical scaling first, then transition to HAMR only when necessary for the next major density jump.

Western Digital: Coexisting ePMR and HAMR

After abandoning MAMR technology in 2017 and having concentrated on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) since then, WD expects its ePMR and ePMR 2-based hard drives to co-exist with HAMR for years to come. Furthermore, as ePMR and HAMR HDDs are very different, this means that the company isn't pursuing a dual-track, like Toshiba, but a multi-track roadmap aimed at maximizing yields and derisking all the technology transitions.

This year, the company's flagship 40TB offerings will rely on ePMR with SMR technology and feature 11 aluminum platters with cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy. To squeeze in 11 aluminum disks and avoid using glass platters, WD had to squeeze the internal mechanics of the drive.

At the same time, Western Digital plans to start the transition to HAMR, with the first commercial 40TB and 44TB HAMR drives entering volume production around 2027, following hyperscaler qualification. Since WD's HAMR drives use edge-emitting lasers to briefly heat the iron-platinum (FePt) layer on the platters to its Curie point — where its magnetic characteristics shift — and temporarily lower coercivity to write the data, the HDD platters must be made of glass (or glass ceramic, though this will be used sometimes next decade), not aluminum, as it may degrade or deform over time. However, based on a comment made by the chief executive of Hoya, the only glass substrate maker for HDD platters in the world, it does not look like WD plans to use glass platters in high volumes for at least a couple of years, which in turn suggests a relatively slow production ramp.

"Starting in the latter half of FY2026 [which begins on October 1, 2026], shipments [of glass substrates] to the second customer will begin in addition to our current primary customer," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "We expect volume to increase substantially in FY2027 [April 1, 2027]. Equipment arrangements for FY2027, specifically for the second customer, have already been decided. Regarding volume beyond FY2028 [April 1, 2028], we are currently analyzing the situation, taking into account not only the increase from the second customer but also the movements of a potential third customer. Capital expenditures will be determined based on that schedule."

Seagate seems to be the primary producer of HDD platters based on glass substrates for its HAMR HDDs, Resonac (former Showa Denko) is catching up with its glass platters for Toshiba (and Seagate), whereas WD is the world's third maker of HDD media that is about to start using glass substrates.

WD expects to use both ePMR + SMR and HAMR technologies till at least 60TB capacity sometimes in 2028 or 2029, though it looks like proven ePMR + SMR will prevail in its shipments in the coming years. Yet, looking further out, WD's roadmap becomes aggressively HAMR-driven after 60TB: capacities are expected to scale to ~100TB in 2029 – 2030, enabled by higher areal density and drive architecture that supports up to 14 platters.

In short, Western Digital's strategy is a bridge-and-accelerate model — extend ePMR as far as possible, then rapidly scale with HAMR once the transition is justified. Beyond that, the company is targeting 140TB+ drives in the 2030s, which will require a transition to even more advanced media concepts, such as ordered granular and bit-patterned media, once HAMR on granular media reaches its limits.

Beyond capacity: High-performance and energy-efficient HDDs

In addition to increasing the capacities of their hard drives, Seagate and WD intend to increase the bandwidth and I/O performance of HDDs.

Seagate has offered its Mach.2-series hard drives with two actuators that double the per-TB IOPS performance of its drives, which is important for many clients that need to maintain their quality-of-service (QoS) specification, something that is getting increasingly hard to do amid growing storage density. Going forward, Seagate intends to increase the number of actuators, though the company expects to reveal its multi-actuator HDD roadmap in late May, when the company has an event for analysts and investors.

WD plans to split its HDD lineup into High-Performance drives (High-Bandwidth and Dual Pivot) and Power-Optimized drives, each tailored for different data center workloads. High-performance HDDs aim to increase bandwidth and/or I/O performance of a single drive with a roadmap towards 8× bandwidth and 4× I/O scaling.

Among the methods used to increase performance are using more than one head to read or write data at the same time, installing another fully independent actuator on a separate pivot that has its own set of heads, and therefore acting like another HDD. Dual-Pivot HDDs are currently in the lab and are targeted to become available in 2028.

In contrast, Power-Optimized drives target 'active cold' storage tiers, where data must remain accessible but does not require high performance. These drives reduce random I/O activity and are engineered to cut power consumption by roughly 20% to lower operating costs in large-scale deployments while offering predictable performance. Such HDDs will be positioned against 3D QLC SSDs starting in 2027. WDl expects these drives to be used to store massive datasets — such as AI logs and checkpoints — at a lower total cost of ownership.

Summary

The HDD market has shrunk from over 200 drive makers in the 1980s to just three in 2026. These three companies — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — tend to compete on capacity and performance, but they tend to do so using a completely different set of technologies, even despite the fact that they use some industry-standard components (HDD platter substrates, motors, etc.).

On the technology front, Seagate is all-in on HAMR; the company is already shipping 44TB drives and targeting 100TB-class products in the early 2030s. By contrast, Toshiba is taking a cautious, step-by-step approach, stretching MAMR and mechanical scaling before introducing HAMR later this decade. Western Digital is arguably the most cautious of the HDD makers, pursuing a multi-track strategy, which includes extending ePMR to 60TB, increasing the number of platters per drive to 14, all while gradually ramping production of HAMR-based HDDs, and targeting to launch 100TB+ drives around 2030.

Beyond capacity, both Seagate and Western Digital are also rethinking HDD performance with multi-actuator and dual-pivot designs to boost bandwidth and I/O performance to make HDD-based storage systems more competitive with SSD-powered systems. In addition, WD is also developing power-optimized drives to cut energy use for 'active cold' storage.

In general, 70 years after inception, the HDD industry is alive and kicking. Three companies are competing intensely to achieve higher storage density, higher efficiency, and predictable performance while retaining competitive per-TB cost compared to solid-state drives.

In a world of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, the supply of computer hardware can barely meet demand, and at this point, long-term supply agreements (LTAs) become compulsory. When it comes to storage — both hard disk drives and solid-state drives — LTAs now span from three to five years, depending on the device. While some may argue that now all the supply will get to large customers, such agreements with guaranteed offtake may actually be good for consumers.

Up to five year LTAs

When it comes to SSDs, long-term supply agreements now span five years, according to Sandisk.

"The duration of this agreement varies, with the longest contract extending to five years," said Luis Visoso, chief financial officer of SanDisk, in an earnings call with analysts and investors. "In aggregate, volume commitments increased during the life of the contracts with quarterly commitments and a combination of fixed and variable pricing. […] These agreements are tailored to meet the needs of our customers and, in aggregate, provide us with demand certainty at financials that we expect will be consistent with our fiscal fourth quarter guidance."

Something similar applies to hard drives, though LTA visibility of Seagate and Western Digital is a bit shorter. In the case of Seagate, the company is even talking about bespoke storage systems.

"We have exabyte-scale supply agreements in place with nearly all major cloud and hyperscale customers, with nearline capacity almost fully allocated through calendar 2027," said William Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, in the company's most recent conference call. "At the same time, we are finalizing build-to-order contracts with these customers through the end of fiscal 2027, which defines specific configuration and pricing. Our value-based pricing approach enables customers to plan with confidence while contributing to sustained profit growth for Seagate, and we are actively engaged in strategic planning discussions now reaching into calendar 2028 and beyond."

The same applies to Western Digital. "Our long-term visibility continues to improve, with the duration of our agreements now extending into calendar year 2028 and calendar year 2029," said Irving Tan, chief executive of Western Digital.

Clear visibility

For years, storage has been considered a commodity, so now these long-term supply agreements give storage makers unusually clear visibility into real demand, which enables them to scale production in a far more disciplined way. SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital can now align NAND wafer starts, HDDs, HDD media output, and controller supply with multi-year volume commitments instead of reacting to short-term market demand. On the one hand, this reduces the risk of overbuilding capacity; on the other hand, it may ensure a lack of underinvesting ahead of demand increases.

With guaranteed demand secured using multi-year contracts, the aforementioned three companies are also more willing to commit billions of dollars to the expansion of fabs, assembly lines, and next-generation technologies such as higher-layer NAND and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). What is even more important, these investments are aimed at confirmed demand rather than speculative forecasts, which in turn enables these companies to look beyond guaranteed demand, which in turn means speculative forecasts on the consumer market. Whether or not they are going to do that remains to be seen.

That being said, expansion remains inherently gradual. New 3D NAND memory capacity —like any semiconductor fab — usually takes years to ramp, and HDD advancements depend on incremental media and read/write head production increases usually at third parties like Hoya, Resonac (former Showa Denko), and TDK, which means supply will tighten before new capacity fully materializes.

To sum up, while a clear visibility of demand gives Sandisk, Seagate, and Western Digital more ability to spend, we have yet to see how everything works out.

Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said that the company has already sold out of hard drives for 2026. Tan confirmed this during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where, according to the transcript shared by Investing.com, he also confirmed that there are already some long-term agreements (LTAs) in place for the next couple of years.

“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the executive said. “And we’ve also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price.” This announcement is on track with the report from late last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years due to massive data center demand.

The company’s VP for Investor Relations, Ambrish Srivastava, said that 89% of its revenue came from its Cloud business, while its consumer business only delivered 5%. Because of this, it would make sense for the company to focus more on enterprise clients — similar to how memory chip makers decided to focus production on the more lucrative HBMs that are in demand from hyperscalers. The cost efficiency of hard drives has especially become more apparent now that SSDs are skyrocketing to more than 16x the price of an equivalent HDD.

However, this is going to be bad news for enthusiasts and consumers. Although many people prefer SSDs for most electronics, there is still a market for consumer hard drives, especially for use in NAS systems and long-term data storage. But the massive demand brought by the AI infrastructure buildout is causing shortages even for this component. Many HDD models have surged in pricing already, with costs jumping by an average of 46% since September 2025.

PC hardware shortages are only getting worse as the AI race continues. What started as a memory and storage chip shortage has soon spread into GPUs and is now hitting hard drives. Most consumers won’t feel the HDD pinch as it’s mostly a niche product in recent years, but we’re afraid that other parts, components, and product categories are going to follow suit with the price increases and supply shortages in the coming months.

Backblaze just released its annual drive reliability report, with the company calculating an overall annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36% for 2025. According to the company page, its drives ran for a total of 115,638,676 cumulative days, with 4,317 units failing. This data comes from a total of 344,196 drives, meaning it has a good sample size that can give us a relatively accurate view of the reliability of the drives that it uses. The 1.36% AFR is the company’s best result since 2022, improving on 2025’s 1.57% AFR and the 1.70% AFR from the year before that.

Unfortunately, all the drive models that the company used suffered from failures. Two units stood out with only one failure each for the entire year — the Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB and the Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB, although the latter has only been used for one quarter. The Toshiba MGO9ACA16TE 16TB takes the third place with only three failures, followed by the Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB and the HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB, which had four and five failures, respectively.

We also don’t have a list of red-flagged drives for the entire year, but Backblaze reported three notable models that had high failure rates for the fourth quarter of 2025 — the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB (10.29%), the Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB (5.23%), and the Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16TB (4.14%).

The company investigated the reason for HGST’s double-digit failure rate, which was a first for that particular drive. It has ruled out temperature or airflow changes, and the current thought is that it has been affected by vibration. But given that these drives are about 7.5 years old, Backblaze decided to earmark them for retirement. On the other hand, the Toshiba’s 4.14% failure rate is already an improvement over the reported 16.95% from the previous quarter, which has already been addressed via a firmware update. Although this is still a bit high, it’s expected to continue normalizing as the new firmware is rolls out.

Despite that, Backblaze says that drive technology has improved over the years, and that capacity is continuously increasing while cost per GB is dropping — at least before the memory chip and storage shortage that begun in late 2025. While hard drives are still cheaper the RAM and SSDs, they’ve have surged by around 46%, with the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now priced at around $500.

If you’re looking for a drive in a last-ditch effort and have passed up the WD Green SN3000, you may want to rewind. Despite the rocky reputation this line of SSDs has, we’ve discovered that this one is actually a hidden gem. Some of the results will definitely surprise you as it delivers good performance and power efficiency for its class. Its performance in random read workloads, in particular, might raise some eyebrows. That makes it a dark horse of a bargain if you catch it at the right time.

It’s easy to look at the warranty – only three years and meager endurance rating – and think this isn’t the one for you. Dismissing it out of hand might be a mistake, though. This drive has a reliable proprietary SSD controller from SanDisk, the same one that makes the Blue SN5000, Blue SN51000, and Black SN7100 work so well. It also has the excellent BiCS8 flash of the latter two. This means it’s basically an updated SN5000 with QLC flash within its capacity range.

For the less technical-minded, this is good news because it means you’re not dealing with an underpowered SSD controller with old flash, and while the move is from TLC to QLC – effectively an endurance downgrade – the newer QLC is faster in most cases. The terabytes written (TBW) endurance rating is also sufficient for a budget drive. It’s the perfect drive to pop into a system if you’re not too worried about the details.

WD Green SN3000 Specifications

The WD Green SN3000 – and yes, this is the model name, even though it’s sold by SanDisk – is available at 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB at $114.99, $204.99, and $406.99 from SanDisk’s site. This is pretty expensive, but luckily, it's available at Newegg for $149.99 at 1TB with the ability to get two in a combo deal for $10 off. We are testing it at 1TB and recommend that capacity, and we also think it’s a good value for the price, despite what your first impressions might be of it being a Green drive – these are traditionally ultra-budget drives that don't have a great reputation – and limited performance specifications.

The drive can reach up to 5,000 / 4,200 MB/s in sequential read/write workloads. This puts it into the range of early mid-range PCIe 4.0 budget drives like the WD Black SN770. By today’s standards, this is slow, but it’s more than fast enough for this segment. The manufacturer lists no IOPS rating, but from our CDM testing, we were able to achieve up to 1 million IOPS with a random write workload.

If the drive has a weak point, it’s with the warranty. It’s only covered for three years versus the normal five, and the write endurance is poor with the 1TB model coming in at 150 terabytes of endurance. This is one-quarter the normal and about one-half what we usually see for QLC flash, although the drive writes per day metric (DWPD) is very much in line with expectations for QLC. Most users, and especially budget-minded users, are not going to burn through this many writes, so the shorter three-year warranty is a more critical factor. For more information on how SanDisk tests for the endurance specification, check out its Use Case Impact on an SSD's Lifespan brief.

WD Green SN3000 Software and Accessories

SanDisk offers two downloads for the Green SN3000: the SanDisk Dashboard, which is an all-in-one SSD toolbox like WD’s Dashboard, and Acronis True Image for Sandisk which is backup and cloning software. We’re a fan of WD’s Dashboard and are glad to see this OEM drive supported fully.

WD Green SN3000: A Closer Look

This is a single-sided drive with an SSD controller, a power management chip, and a single NAND flash package. This layout allows for a shorter form factor if necessary. The extra space between the controller and the flash reduces heat buildup and makes the drive a good candidate for thermal padding or a heat spreader, if you so desire. The drive is rated for 3.3V/2.5A, which is above 8W, but it’s designed to pull a maximum of around 5.6W. This is within the expected range for a drive of this class.

Based on our results, we’re fairly confident this is using SanDisk 218-Layer BiCS8 QLC flash. This means it should be the same as the WD Blue SN5100, or now the SanDisk Optimus 5100, but run at a slower speed. This could involve binning of some sort – lower interface speeds are more generous for the controller and flash – or simply market segmentation, although it wouldn’t be surprising if the flash being used is of lower endurance. This means you can get SN5100 levels of random performance at a lower price point if you’re willing to compromise on the warranty and some sequential bandwidth. The BiCS8 flash has architectural improvements over BiCS6 for superior latency and power efficiency, which elevates this drive above the QLC-based 4TB WD Blue SN5000 and, frankly, it can beat the TLC SKUs of that drive, too, in everything but sustained write performance.

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Comparison Products

We’re looking at three classes of drives today. The first includes high-end PCIe 4.0 “budget” drives, which include the TLC-based Inland TN470 and the QLC-based Biwin NV7200. There are drives that can saturate the interface for maximum bandwidth potential. The mid-grade options are closer to the 5 GB/s mark and include the proprietary Samsung 990 EVO, WD Black SN770, and WD Blue SN580. Non-proprietary drives in this section are the Addlink S91 and Patriot P400. These are drives that are clearly faster than PCIe 3.0 options, but may use older flash, as that’s all that’s needed to hit these speeds. Lastly, there’s the TeamGroup NV5000, a PCIe 3.0 drive in a PCIe 4.0 disguise, which is probably closer to where buyers might think the Green SN3000 would fall. One thing that helps the Green SN3000 stand out here is its newer flash, which is why it surprises.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

Right off the bat, we think the Green SN3000 will surprise some people. Its 3DMark performance is quite good, beating the popular Black SN770 and punching near decent TLC-based drives like the TN470. It is more than adequate for games and, in fact, it should deliver an excellent experience with solid improvement over Gen 3 drives.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry-standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

The Green SN3000 fares even better in PCMark 10. Its competition isn’t super stiff, but clearing other drives in its performance range like the 990 EVO and Black SN770 is a massive win. If you thought a WD Green SSD couldn’t make it as a primary drive, the results here should have you reconsidering. This drive is exceptionally responsive for one that uses QLC flash.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of an additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

The Green SN3000 is limited in the PS5 because it cannot saturate the full PCIe 4.0 interface. Does this matter? In some edge cases, yes, but if your goal is to have a drive for games with minimal difference in load times, this will get the job done. Which is just as well since spending current SSD dollars on something high-end for the PS5 is a luxury. There’s also the added benefit of this drive not needing a heatsink, which could save you some extra money, too.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The Green SN3000 cannot reach the throughput heights of the full-fledged Gen 4 drives – the NV7200 and TN470 – but it is best among the mid-range ones. This is very good performance and makes the drive suitable as a secondary or storage drive in your system. We caution that large writes or ones made when the drive is fuller may suffer, so check our Write Saturation section to see how it handles the worst-case.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

Ignoring the anomalous results at 4MiB – we’re not sure what caused this bug, but it isn’t real-world – the Green SN3000 performs as expected in ATTO. No real weak spots aside from a small dip at 512KiB. Its maximum or plateau performance level at higher block sizes is not as good as the NV7200 or TN470, which is to be expected given the sequential performance specifications. We’re specifically interested in the read performance as it is more indicative of real-world workloads for most users. Sequential write performance, which also maps to CDM’s results, is more disappointing, but the drive still beats the Blue SN580, which has been an incredibly popular entry-level drive.

But we’re all here to see the random 4K read results, right? That has always been the marker for real-world feel. We think people underestimate the value of sequential read performance, especially for game load times, but it’s undeniable that 4K random read performance is the most important metric for a consumer drive. SSDs are supposed to feel slick and responsive. It just so happens that the Green SN3000 returns fantastic results for this, and we do have an explanation.

It’s using BiCS8 flash, which has the lowest latency of all flash we’ve tested, even as QLC rather than TLC. In its pSLC mode – and recent or often-used data can reside in pSLC if the controller deems it worthy – it’s just as fast as the TLC variant found on the SanDisk WD Black SN7100 or SanDisk Optimus SN7100. Latency won’t be quite as good because the controller and flash are running at a lower transfer rate, which is why this drive maxes out at 5 GB/s rather than 7+ GB/s. However, it’s still lightning fast, and even 4K write latency is good enough to stay in contention. Simply put, the Green SN3000 is a potential sleeper.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

The weakest point for any QLC-based drive is its sustained write performance. QLC drives usually have massive pSLC caches to mask weak performance of the underlying flash. Larger caches, once depleted, make the native performance even worse because the drive struggles to handle incoming writes while freeing up the necessary space. This is because pSLC is only one byte for every four bytes of QLC, and sooner or later, that becomes a problem.

The drive’s pSLC performance isn’t exactly inspiring, either, with writes around 4.44 GB/s. This lasts over 50 seconds, so the cache is around 222GB. This isn’t quite the maximum possible – one-fourth of the flash would be over 250GB – and this matches the scheme that WD and SanDisk use on other drives like the Optimus SN7100. Basically, it’s assumed there is some static cache and a lot of dynamic cache, but some space is left free to improve sustained write performance. Static cache is useful for small, bursty, random writes, while the dynamic cache helps carry longer writes. At least in theory – the Green SN3000 falls flat on its face once the cache runs out.

In this so-called folding mode, which is when the controller must write data from pSLC to QLC, performance drops to just over 200 MB/s. This is very slow and slower than many hard drives. It’s hard to avoid this because QLC flash is slower, and this is using only a four-channel controller. For some, this is a dealbreaker, and we understand that. For most users, this should not be a huge issue, but it’s definitely a significant weak point. Coupled with the low maximum write performance, we would not recommend this drive for any write-heavy roles. Such roles could include anything from use as caching for NAS to the drive’s use in an external enclosure, places where prolonged writes or writes with a very full drive are going to be detrimental to QLC flash performance.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features so we show the worst-case for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

WD’s and SanDisk’s mid-range SSD have been popular budget options and, to be more specific, are popular choices for laptops. Laptops benefit from lithe, power-efficient drives as these fit better, cool better, and dent battery life less. To compete in this space, the Green SN3000 would have to be power-efficient, and thankfully, it is. Since the drive is still using SanDisk’s proprietary controller technology, the gains mostly come from the flash. BiCS8 has proven to be incredibly efficient – largely due to its architectural changes – and this means the Green SN3000 is more efficient than the older Blue SN580 and Black SN770. That’s another big win.

In our testing, the drive hit a maximum of 67°C, which, while not cool, is also not very hot for a modern SSD. These SSDs don’t throttle until about 90°C, so there is plenty of headroom here. The design of the drive is also perfect for adding a basic heatspreader, low-profile heatsink, or thermal padding for use in laptops, enclosures, HTPCs, portable systems, and more. This is because the distance between the controller and flash package is large enough that the thermal equilibrium point would be within the range of both components, and there would be more surface area for heat dissipation. Even without any of that, this drive should be fine to operate, as-is, in almost any system.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

WD Green SN3000 Bottom Line

The WD Green SN3000 is a strange drive in many ways. It’s still called the WD Green SN3000 despite SanDisk taking over SSDs and renaming them recently. That’s because it’s an OEM drive meant for prebuilts. However, you can get it from their site and others like Newegg, although be careful of the price. Normally, we would not dive too deeply into an OEM drive, but this is not a typical situation. Luckily, there is nothing keeping you from buying this drive if you want. We think that OEM drives that were once overlooked will become more popular as worldwide SSD stock dwindles. We will be reviewing more SSDs like this over time. Given those conditions, we feel this drive deserves a decent score to reflect where it fits right now.

The other part that’s strange – in the sense that we didn’t expect these results – is that WD’s Green SSDs have a pretty bad reputation. There are reasons for that reputation. The first is that the line has a weak warranty and, specifically, low write endurance. The second is that hardware swaps in the past have nerfed the drive into being a glorified USB drive at times, at least for the SATA models. This has caused the Green SN3000 to be overlooked when, in reality, it’s a pretty good drive. In fact, it’s basically a speed-limited Blue SN5100, which means that in everyday use, it could almost trade blows with the Black SN7100. This is because your workloads run in the pSLC cache most of the time and don’t even notice the QLC flash. On top of that, you rarely need more than about 5 GB/s of sequential performance, so it's not a bad trade-off.

The biggest problem, without a doubt, is that its sustained write performance is pretty terrible. This is nothing new for a QLC drive. We think it’s easy to overlook this, given how well it performs on our benchmarks. It’s certainly a great budget drive, and low endurance is hardly a real problem in practice. The BiCS8 flash is pretty solid in terms of reliability, especially with SanDisk’s proprietary controller, and its random read performance is excellent. The real concern is probably pricing and availability – what else is new? – but if you can be swift in picking one up with a good price, you’re getting a real diamond in the rough.

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Due to the ongoing global memory shortage, SSD pricing has also risen gradually over the past few months, particularly for models with onboard DRAM cache. That said, if you are looking to add high-performance storage to your PC, the WD Black SN850 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is currently available for under $200 on Amazon. This is the lowest price we’ve seen for the drive in the past six months, except for a brief period in September when the SSD dropped to $191.47.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

The slightly faster SN850X has succeeded the WD Black SN850, yet it remains a solid choice for anyone seeking a fast and reliable PCIe 4.0 SSD. The drive is designed for high-performance PCs and consoles, including official PS5 support, and includes a heatsink to improve thermal performance. Featuring WD’s proprietary controller with a BiCS4 96-layer TLC NAND and a Micron DDR4 DRAM cache, it offers sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 5,100 MB/s on the 2TB storage model.

Even random performance is strong, with 1,000,000 IOPS for reads and 710,000 IOPS for writes, supporting responsiveness in real-world tasks such as game loading, file copying, and multitasking. Additionally, the drive offers a high endurance rating of 1,200 TBW (terabytes written) and a five-year warranty.

The drive also includes WD’s advanced SLC caching system (nCache 4.0), which aims to improve sustained performance by dynamically allocating portions of the TLC NAND as a faster cache during heavy workloads. This makes it suitable not only for gaming but also for content creation, large file transfers, and professional workflows. There is no hardware-based AES-256 encryption, but it supports standard features like Trim, S.M.A.R.T., and low-power states.

If you have been waiting for a good deal on a high-end SSD, now is a strong time to grab the WD Black SN850 2TB for $199 before prices may rise again.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

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.

New lasers

These edge-emitting lasers are efficient enough to make HAMR possible, but are mechanically and optically constrained, according to Ahmed Shihab, chief product officer at Western Digital. These lasers waste part of the generated light and are physically tall. That height forces additional spacing between platters, while optical losses limit how much thermal energy can be delivered to the media — both factors directly restrict areal density scaling.

More importantly, edge-emitting HAMR lasers are made with low yields as they rely on mechanical cleaving, precision optical alignment, and thermal screening, which prevents wafer-level testing. As a consequence, they can only be tested as part of the final head assembly, which greatly reduces yield (something that killed RDRAM years ago, as these memory chips must be tested only as part of the module assembly).

"Everybody in the industry, us included, use what is called an edge-emitting laser," Shibab said. "It is the gray box that you see sitting on the top [see the image above]. They work really well. They are the ones powering HAMR today, but they have three challenges. The light produced sometimes is wasted, so they waste a bit of energy that could be better used elsewhere. They’re quite tall, so we have to make sure the platters are some distance apart from each other. And during the hard drive manufacturing process, the yields are not as good as we’d like them to be."

To remove these limitations, Western Digital spent six years developing a patented vertical-emitting laser. Unlike conventional designs, it emits light straight down onto the magnetic media, couples more energy onto the disk, and is significantly shorter in the Z-dimension. This change enables two parallel advances: higher areal density (up from today's four terabytes per platter all the way to 10 TBs per platter) as well as a thinner head assembly that allows more disks to be packed into the same 3.5-inch drive. Furthermore, Western Digital's new vertical laser is made using a lithography process and can be tested on a wafer independently of the head, so the company also expects meaningfully higher manufacturing yields.

"By emitting more light, harnessing more of that light into the recording technology, we will increase the aerial density of the HAMR platters from four terabytes all the way to 10 terabytes by 2028 per platter," said Shihab. "This technology is not theoretical. It is actually already in the labs. We have watched it during the recording."

14 platters

Alongside its new vertical laser technology, Western Digital is also working on an HDD platform capable of housing up to 14 platters, another part of the equation enabling the company to increase the capacity of its hard drives significantly over the next 10 years or so.

The 12-platter platform will first be used with 60TB ePMR drives in 2028. While Western Digital does not disclose how many platters the company's 60TB HAMR HDD will use, it says that its ePMR and HAMR drives will use the same platform, which suggests that HAMR products will also use generally the same design.

 "We also borrowing some of the ideas from Hammer," said the CPO of Western Digital. "So, to get to 60, we will go to 12 platters. We are packing more capacity inside the same three and a half inch, all without changing the power profile of the drive. The customers don't have to spend more energy doing what we do."

Which is perhaps why Shihab carefully frames the new vertical laser technology not as a one-time capacity boost, but as a structural reset of HAMR's scaling curve that will aggressively grow starting in 2028 and is expected to enable 100TB HDDs in 2029 ~ 2030. In fact, once the vertical laser technology reaches its apex with granular media, sometime in the 2030s, Western Digital will be able to offer drives with an up to 140 TB capacity.

"10 terabytes, 14 platters, that sounds like 140 terabytes," Shihab teased.

Interestingly, but Western Digital's dual-actuator Dual Pivot HDDs that promise to double both bandwidth and sequential I/O IOPS performance also enter the scene at a 60TB capacity, though the company is tight-lipped whether these hard drives use ePMR or HAMR recording technology.

 "Dual Pivot technology helps customers focus their software effort on improving more performance for AI versus having to deal with how the hard drives work," Western Digital's chief product officer said. "We will introduce this at the 60 TB mark. […] So we are starting to put High Bandwidth drive technology in our customers hands today [and] my biggest problem is finding them enough material so they can start testing. Dual Pivot technology will be in their hands in late 2027 and in 2028.

Beyond 140 TB per drive

After that 140 TB milestone (which is pretty contingent), the company will have to move on to ordered granular (OG) and eventually bit patterned media (BPM), which is when HDD disks will be patterned using highly sophisticated etching, nanoimprint lithography, e-beam lithography, or even photolithography.

With BPM, hard drive technology will be dealing with very localized heating, which must be controlled with extreme accuracy. Excess energy can disturb neighboring bits, while insufficient energy prevents reliable writes, which is why somewhere along the line, HDD makers will have to invent next-generation laser designs that will combine heating performance with extreme precision.

At Western Digital's Innovation Day 2026 event, the company announced a new intelligent storage platform layer with open APIs that is designed to help customers operating 200+ PB fleets to both manage those devices and seamlessly add new ones.

The software layer is set to launch in 2027 and is intended to simplify integration of different classes of storage devices (including UltraSMR hard drives by non-hyperscalers), reduce qualification risk, and accelerate deployment of new devices. As an added bonus (to WD, at least), that platform layer will lock in customers with its hardware.

Now that solid-state drives command the lion’s share of client storage devices, data center-grade storage represents the majority of Western Digital’s business and the company has to adjust its offerings accordingly. While large hyperscalers develop their own hardware stacks, smaller players lack appropriate resources, making it increasingly hard for them to manage their expanding fleets of storage servers.

As a consequence, while these cloud and enterprise organizations increasingly operate storage pools totaling hundreds of petabytes, they still rely on manual integration, long qualification cycles, and fragmented storage tiers. To help its partners, Western Digital's new intelligent storage platform software abstracts complexity of large-scale storage environments and exposes them as programmable infrastructure. The goal is not to replace existing architectures, but to overlay them with automation and management capabilities that simplifies integration and accelerates time-to-production.

This new platform is designed to support the entire Western Digital portfolio, including SSDs, high-performance/high-capacity ePMR and HAMR-based HDDs, and ultra-high capacity SMR and UltraSMR hard drives. Using a common software framework will make it easier for cloud and enterprise customers to adopt new technologies that were otherwise hard or risky for them to use, including the latest and upcoming HDD platforms.

For obvious reasons, such a software layer locks customers with Western Digital and makes it far less appealing for them to adopt drives from rivals Seagate or Toshiba.

"WD's Innovation Day revealed a company that has genuinely transformed its strategy around customer infrastructure needs," said Ed Burns, HDD Research Director at IDC. "The market validation is already evident – customers are deploying these solutions because WD is solving what matters most for AI infrastructure: reliable capacity at scale, performance that meets demanding workloads, and economics that enable profitability. This customer-centric approach, combined with operational discipline positions WD well in the market going forward."

Although NAND memory has replaced traditional hard disk drives in the vast majority of client PCs, HDDs can still offer capacities at costs not achievable by solid-state drives today, particularly in the data center space. In a bid to retain the relevance of hard drives for years to come, Western Digital on Tuesday announced two distinct families of HDDs: one aimed at applications that require maximum performance and decent IOPS-per-TB, another designed for power-optimized applications that value limited power consumption and predictable performance.

High-Bandwidth HDD

The whole concept of Western Digital's High-Bandwidth HDD stems from reading data from the media using more than one head and transferring it to one or two hosts. The company showcases two types of High-Bandwidth HDDs at its Innovation Day: one uses more than one head for reading and writing at the same time to achieve 2X bandwidth compared to conventional HDDs, and another one features a second fully independent actuator to achieve 2X bandwidth and 2X sequential I/O performance. Over time, High-Bandwidth HDDs are projected to scale up bandwidth by eight times and I/O by four times when both approaches are combined within a single HDD.

WD's original dual-actuator High-Bandwidth HDD architecture — which is already being validated by the company's clients — allows multiple heads on multiple tracks to read and write simultaneously, thus exploiting internal parallelism to deliver 2X bandwidth of traditional 3.5-inch HDDs.

The next step for Western Digital is its Dual-Pivot High-Bandwidth HDD architecture is to add a second, fully independent actuator on a separate pivot inside the same 3.5-inch drive. Each actuator controls its own set of heads and enables two independent read/write operations at once, thus delivering up to 2X sequential I/O performance without reducing capacity. Dual-Pivot HDDs are currently in the lab and are targeted to become available in 2028. Over time, the two architectures will be combined to deliver 4X higher I/O performance compared to traditional hard drives.

Power-Optimized HDDs

In addition to offering High-Bandwidth drives for performance-demanding applications, Western Digital is also working on Power-Optimized HDDs that reduce power consumption by 20% for 'active cold' storage tier.

Western Digital positions Power-Optimized HDDs for 'active cold' storage tier for AI workloads that generate massive volumes of data — such as datasets, checkpoints, and logs — which must remain quickly accessible (which rules out tape), but cannot be stored on traditional high-capacity HDDs or SSDs due to cost concerns.

The company says that these power-optimized 3.5-inch HDDs use a 'minimal random IO' for 20% less power than conventional drives, which reduces ownership costs and makes 'active cold' storage cheaper to run. WD expects the first power-optimized HDDs to enter customer qualification in 2027.

Competing with QLC-based SSDs

Although High-Bandwidth and Power Optimized HDDs serve completely different purposes, they are paradoxically designed to rival the wide product category — data center-grade 3D QLC NAND-based SSDs. Such drives can offer storage density and performance that cannot be achieved by modern HDDs. However, by tailoring features and performance of hard disk drives for particular applications, Western Digital believes it can offer better value than QLC NAND-based SSDs.

Western Digital on Tuesday announced plans to extend its energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology to 60TB, thus producing ePMR-based hard drives along with its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for several years down the road to guarantee steady availability of high-capacity drives. The company intends to release its 40TB UltraSMR hard drive in the second half of this year, with its HAMR-based counterpart following in 2027. By 2029, Western Digital plans to offer 100TB HAMR-based HDDs.

Western Digital made several important announcements about its short-term, mid-term, and long-term hard disk drive roadmap at its Innovation Day 2026 event on Thursday. The key part of the announcement is that the company will extend usage of its ePMR technology to 60TB hard drives, which means that high-capacity ePMR HDDs will coexist with HAMR drives over the next several years. HAMR HDDs (of unknown capacity) remain on track for mass production in 2027 after getting qualified by Western Digital's hyperscale customers.

The flagship HDD from Western Digital this year will be its 40TB HDD based on the ePMR technology and using shingled track layout (SMR) with UltraSMR enhancements, which is currently being qualified by two hyperscale customers. Previously, the company planned to offer a 36TB HDD based on the ePMR 2 technology with conventional magnetic recording (CMR), a 40TB SMR drive, and a 44TB UltraSMR HDD.

This 40TB hard drive will not be the last ePMR-based product from the company, as Western Digital intends to keep using the technology for at least a couple of years before HAMR-powered solutions will take over when HDD capacities hit 60TB. Yet, these next-generation ePMR drives will be 'leveraging HAMR innovations without increasing power consumption.' While Western Digital yet has to disclose what it means, we assume that the company intends to use a unified platform for ePMR and HAMR drives with next-generation media that uses iron platinum (FePt), which allows to achieve much higher areal densities — think 2.5 Tb/inch² – 3.5 Tb/inch² — than is possible today.

"The result is unprecedented flexibility," a statement by Western Digital reads. "Hyperscalers and enterprises can adopt either technology on their own timelines with predictable capacity planning and seamless scaling – no forced technology transitions, no infrastructure disruptions, just continuous and accelerating capacity growth built on architecture they already trust."

For now, Western Digital does not disclose the capacity of its first HAMR drives, but it is safe to say that they will succeed its 40TB UltraSMR hard drive in 2027. Also, it looks like the company plans to advance its HAMR-based offerings at a high pace with plans to offer 100TB HAMD hard drives by 2029, essentially moving from 40TB in 2026 to 100TB in less than three years.

We live in an uncertain world when it comes to SSD storage. Severe market pressures, fuelled by the rapid growth in AI, have caused NAND flash prices to skyrocket. When reasonably priced stock appears, it quickly sells out. It doesn't matter if you're looking for a PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 SSD for your PC or laptop, either as your boot drive or as a second drive for additional storage, because the prices aren't playing ball.

These rapid price changes for SSDs leave buyers in a quandary. You can't turn back time to last year's prices, so if you need a new SSD, you'll need to be savvy with where you look and how much you spend.

We'll be updating this list bi-weekly for the foreseeable future. Given how many hundreds, if not thousands, of different SSDs there are out there, we're focusing on just some of the major makes and models here, and only on NVMe drives, not older SATA alternatives. We break the drives down into several categories based on capacity and interface speeds to help you find the best one for your budget.

Our list of the best SSDs is still the first place to start if you're unsure what type of drive to buy for your setup. If you know the capacity and model you're looking for, we've put together a comprehensive list of leading 4TB, 2TB, and 1TB SSDs at their lowest available prices in the United States.

If you're looking for other component upgrades, you can find further savings in our lists of SSD deals, GPU deals, CPU deals, gaming laptop deals, monitor deals, 3D printer deals, and PC hardware deals.

Lowest SSD Prices by Capacity and Model 

PCIe 5 SSDs: Lowest Prices

PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are the latest in SSD tech, offering the most bandwidth and fastest sequential speeds, as long as your PC or laptop supports it. You can find SSDs with sequential reads and writes of up to 14,800 MB/s, almost double what you'll manage with a top-class Gen 4 alternative. These are the best of the best, so unfortunately, demand for their use with AI is exceptionally high at the moment. Expect to pay top dollar for the privilege of owning one, but if you do, you'll get the fastest speeds possible to date.

Unlike the other categories, we're grouping all of the PCIe 5 drive capacities together.

4TB SSDs: Lowest Prices

You'll find all of our recommended PCIe 4 and 3 drives in 4TB capacity below. This is typically a category with high prices to consider, but if your budget can stretch this far, this is a great option for a one-and-done drive. 4TB is going to leave you plenty of space for a big collection of game installations, along with videos, the odd virtual machine, and even an AI model or two.

2TB SSDs: Lowest Prices

2TB has often been the sweet spot for gamers, offering a little extra over 1TB, but without the much larger price demands of a 4TB model. You'll see our recommendations for 2TB drives, along with up-to-date pricing, below. Drives like the Western Digital SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro continue to be the best models to choose from, but these high-demand items are priced at a premium. While there are stock gaps from time to time, 2TB drives continue to remain (mostly) available.

1TB SSDs: Lowest Prices

You can still pick up lower capacity drives, but 1TB is the minimum capacity we'd recommend, even with higher prices. Given how much space an operating system like Windows 11 can take, not to mention the huge capacity requirements for AAA games, media editing, or local LLM work for AI, you're going to need a 1TB SSD for your boot drive if you don't want to immediately run out of space.

There's also the option, if your device has a spare NVMe slot, to install a second drive for extra storage. This can be a good way to free up space on your boot drive for your OS and important applications. While the price increases will make this a harder choice for some, if you need the space, you'll want to pick up a drive that can handle it. Our recommendations below cover 1TB SSDs at PCIe 3 and 4 speeds.

These drives are featured at the lowest prices we can find in the U.S. for these major SSD makes and models. While you might be able to find no-brand drives at a lower cost, this isn't something we'd recommend, as these come untested and with a higher likelihood of failure, with irretrievable data loss as the end result.

AI isn't just affecting SSDs, so make sure to check out our GPU price index for twice-weekly updates on where to find the best prices for a new graphics card, too.

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Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital has confirmed that it is looking into potential problems with its older hard drives identified by data recovery scientists. The drives in question, a collection of 2TB to 6TB WD Blue and Red models released around 2020, are SMR drives, a classification that already brought WD a class-action lawsuit in 2021.

"Trust and reliability are the foundation of everything we do at Western Digital," reads WD's official response to German outlet Heise Online. "We take the results reported by 030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH seriously and have initiated an investigation by our engineering teams to understand the scope and details of these reports."

As WD alludes to, multiple data recovery scientists, including 030 data recovery, have begun reporting the issues fundamental to WD's use of SMR technology in lower-capacity drives. An open secret since 2021, data scientists have known that these 2TB to 6TB WD Red and Blue SMR drives have increased chances of failure, up to permanent data loss and physical drive damage.

SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives have been an available technology for hard drive makers to increase capacity cheaply at the cost of performance for years. SMR drives "shingle" data written onto them, as the name suggests, by overlaying the write tracks of data on top of other data, like roof shingles.

While this results in up to 25% greater capacity per platter in smaller drive sizes, it also adds layers of complexity and failure, as rewriting write tracks shingled under neighboring data becomes a whole production. As a result, SMR in smaller consumer drives has anecdotally caused problems in ZFS, RAID, and other redundant file systems for years. For a longer lesson on SMR, see our explainer written here in our first article on WD's use of SMR in these very drives in 2020.

Now, data recovery scientists are confirming that Western Digital Blue and Red drives with the WD*0EZAZ, WD*0EDAZ, and WD*0EFAX model numbers at the 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, and 6TB sizes are prone to abnormally high failure rates. Data scientists like 030 Datenrettung, mentioned above, also previously included WD Purple drives released at the same time in their list of failing SMR drives, but WD confirmed that the Purple drives are built on a different enough firmware that the same issues would not affect these drives. Larger SMR drives are also not at risk of the same failures.

The EZAZ, EDAZ, and EFAX drive models have been trouble for WD many times before. When the drives were released in 2020, WD did not disclose to consumers that the drives utilize SMR technology, a serious omission. While the company issued an apology for its blunder, a class-action lawsuit launched in 2021 secured a $2.7 million compensation fund for hoodwinked WD customers, paying out $4-$7 per claimant.

Now, these same problematic drives are also proving to be at risk of serious damage and data loss. Anyone using WD hard drives at these sizes from 2020 or later should check their hardware to ensure they are not also at risk of data loss and failure; data scientists suggest that the first sign of trouble with the drives will be loud noises coming from the spinning platters, though that warning sign is a fairly universal signal of something going terribly wrong.

One of the largest external HDDs on the market, at a massive 28TB in size, this drive has plenty of space for storing your pictures and videos, as well as an ample amount of room for other data types. Seagate's Expansion Desktop drive is a traditional 3.5" hard disk drive contained in an external enclosure that requires its own power source, and connects to your PC via USB for simple setup and file transfer.

Best Buy is offering a limited-time deal where you can save $60 on the list price of the Seagate Expansion Desktop 28TB HDD, now $329.99, reduced from $389.99. The massive 28TB capacity means more than enough room for your files, and with the USB 3.0 bandwidth, the transfer speeds will be fast enough for most storage and backup situations. The deal also comes with Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Service, should the unthinkable happen and the drive fails. The deal is set to expire on September 14th, according to Best Buy's website.

• Check out the deal at Best Buy

These external storage solutions are ideal for storing data that doesn't require extremely fast transfer rates and offer a convenient solution if you prefer not to pursue the NAS route. Some of these external HDD enclosures have Exos drives that are good for shucking the drives out of, but do some research into what drives they contain, as shucking the drive will most certainly void the warranty, and it's a bit of a minefield determining what drive is actually contained inside.

The 28TB Seagate Expansion HDD is housed in a rugged black plastic case that measures 7 x 2 x 5 inches, with small feet on the bottom of the chassis. Power and USB cable connections are located at the rear of the drive, where you will need to connect the external AC power adapter. Make sure you have ample power outlets available for connecting this device alongside your desktop PC or laptop.

This Seagate desktop drive comes with an 18-inch USB 3.0 cable and a power cable included in the box. Accompanying the purchase of the Seagate drive is the option of using Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services software for data backups, which offers a single in-lab attempt to recover the data from the Seagate drive.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

One of the largest-capacity SSDs you can get at a realistic price, for use in a gaming PC, is now more accessible than ever, thanks to a new low-price discount. If you need a single high-capacity drive for systems with limited M.2 slots or shared PCIe lanes, opting for a large SSD like this is a great choice. You shouldn't have any issues squeezing in the bloated file sizes of the latest Call of Duty game, or just installing all of your most recently played games on just the one drive. This deal isn't aimed at anyone building a budget PC, as the over-$500 price tag is still a large outlay. However, it's no longer more expensive to buy one of these large 8TB drives over two smaller 4TB SSDs.

Today's deal sees the 8TB WD Black SN850X fall to $539.99 at Amazon. This is virtually identical to buying two 4TB SN850Xs at their current cost of $269.99 each. Just one of these SSDs will beef up the storage capacity of your system for anything from game installs to large video files. The WD Black SN850X is one of the best SSDs for gaming and the PS5, with transfer speeds that almost max out the PCIe Gen 4.0 bandwidth.

• Check out the deal at Amazon
• Check out the deal direct from SanDisk

Originally a definite halo-tier product with its $899.99 price tag, the 8TB SN850X was out of reach for a lot of PC builders, especially considering you could pick up smaller variants of the same drive for a fraction of the price. But now that it is within just a few cents or so of two smaller capacity drives, that gap has closed. I would still love to see this drive come down a lot more in price to make it more affordable, but it is heading in the right direction. This is the ideal drive solution for PC builds with limited M.2 SSD slots that require a lot of storage capacity.

We reviewed the 8TB WD Black SN850X and found that this no-compromise SSD performed excellently, with sequential read and write speeds of 7,200 MB/s and 6,600 MB/s, respectively. There's a slight drop in write speed, from 100 MB/s to 90 MB/s, compared to the smaller capacity SN850X SSDs available, but an increase in random write IOPS to 100K. The 8TB SN850X uses Kioxia 162-Layer TLC (BiCS6) flash memory and the proprietary Triton MP16+ B2 controller.

Using the 3D Storage Benchmark test to measure real-world gaming performance, there was effectively no change in 3DMark when comparing the 2TB to the 8TB WD SN850X. A good thing, as some drives in the past could lose performance at very high capacities. Performance here is good for a PCIe 4.0 drive, only really surpassed by the 4TB 990 Pro and T500, and naturally, the much faster PCIe 5.0 T700 drive.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Decades of evolution have made NAND flash memory both cheap and incredibly sophisticated. No matter what modern device you pick up, the likelihood is that it will use some kind of NAND, which has become ubiquitous in both consumer products and data centers. If you cast your mind back several decades, NAND was expensive, despite its capability to be faster than spinning disks. As the technology has matured, its use has grown exponentially. But what's next?

In the coming years, we're going to see cheaper, more advanced non-volatile flash memory inside our devices. Those 3D NAND devices will be built from over 500 layers and boast interface speeds of up to 4800 MT/s. This blistering speed may pave the way to all-new kinds of devices with significantly increased performance compared to today's best SSDs.

The next step

Like other technologies, 3D NAND develops in multiple directions. End users demand higher capacity, higher performance, lower power, compact dimensions, and lower cost. Manufacturers themselves want to earn money, so while meeting demand, they try to cut costs by making smaller memory devices. Given the current state of industry development, the best way to keep the size of 3D NAND dies in check is to increase the number of layers and decrease the size of the actual data storage location — the memory cell itself. This practice is commonplace among memory makers today.

Leading makers of 3D NAND memory, including Kioxia, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, and YMTC, have all developed multiple 3D NAND generations, consistently increasing layer counts while reducing cell sizes. For now, the majority of 3D NAND-based devices, including SSDs and smartphones, rely on memory with 2xx layers, with each layer holding an incredible number of memory cells for data storage.

This might be 218-layer 3D NAND from Kioxia, 232-layer 3D NAND from Micron, or 286-layer 3D NAND from Samsung.

The pace at which manufacturers adopt new layer counts and boost transfer rates varies across the industry, making things difficult to track. So let's examine where we were in 2023, how it's going, and where we might be in 2027. Just as a reminder: Kioxia also has a close production partnership with Western Digital's flash division, which also owns SanDisk as a subsidiary. Within this article, we'll refer to the duo as Kioxia / Western Digital.

In recent years, the industry faced significant challenges in building an SSD with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface that would fully saturate that interface. ICs with a high-performance interface that could fully saturate the lane using an eight-channel controller (e.g., 2400 MT/s) are rare. Instead, ICs that supported lower speeds are much more common.

By early 2023, all three major NAND vendors — Kioxia / Western Digital, Micron, and Samsung — had established 2400 MT/s as the baseline interface speed across TLC products. Kioxia's BiCS 6T and 6Q nodes, Micron’s B58, and Samsung’s V8T are representative of these tiers as a mainstream standard, and perhaps this reflects a consistent performance scaling for both consumer and enterprise storage segments.

In 2024, Samsung took the next incremental step by introducing its V9T TLC at 3000 MT/s. This intermediate speed tier, not shared by other vendors in the roadmap, highlights Samsung’s focus on being a vertically integrated company that focuses mainly on its own-brand products, like smartphones and SSDs.

Kioxia / Western Digital reached 3200 MT/s in the second half of 2024, with its 8th Gen BiCS 3D TLC, followed by QLC (BiCS 8Q) products in 2025 H2. However, Kioxia / Western Digital has not mentioned using 7th Gen products at all, skipping it entirely.

This reflects a general push to align both TLC and QLC offerings on higher-performance platforms. Notably, Kioxia / Western Digital is the only vendor explicitly listed in the roadmap as deploying 3200 MT/s in both cell types, showing a strong commitment to QLC performance uplift.

In 2024, Micron came to leadership with its B68S IC, sporting a 3600 MT/s data transfer rate. By the second half of 2025, the company’s QLC roadmap plans to catch up with Samsung via the N69 generation. This highlights Micron’s early adoption of faster interfaces for high-end products, but since it's yet to be released, its impact and uptake remain to be seen. Kioxia/Western Digital also lists its BiCS 8Q QLC reaching 3600 MT/s in 2025 H2, indicating a broader QLC performance push across the industry.

All vendors eventually converge at 4800 MT/s by 2027, which becomes the high-performance standard. Kioxia/WD reaches this milestone with BiCS 9T TLC in 2027 H1, Micron with B78 TLC and N79 QLC in 2027 H1–H2, and Samsung with its 11th generation of V-NAND.

Performance headwinds

Manufacturing high-speed NAND flash (3600 MT/s and higher) requires a more expensive logic process technology, which drives up production costs and inflates flash memory prices.

An increase in 3D NAND data transfer rates will have a very practical implication on how devices like SSDs or smartphones are built.

To fully saturate a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface — which provides up to 15.75 GB/s of effective bandwidth — a modern NAND flash setup requires an SSD controller with eight channels at 2400 MT/s, six channels at 3600 MT/s, or just four channels at 4800 MT/s. In a year or two, PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers won't require eight channels to fully saturate the hungry interface.

For PCIe 6.0 x4, which doubles throughput to around 31.5 GB/s effective (after protocol overhead), the number of required channels increases 16 at 2400 MT/s, 12 at 3600 MT/s, and eight at 4800 MT/s. As NAND I/O performance approaches these thresholds, high-end SSDs can exploit PCIe 6.0 capabilities with eight high-speed NAND devices. However, it remains to be seen whether PCIe 6.0 x4 SSDs will be a reality for consumer storage devices within the next few years.

Die capacities

Based on the roadmap data that we have collated, leading 3D NAND makers will converge, landing with 1 Tb and 2 Tb die capacities by around 2026 - 2027, particularly for 3D QLC products. While there are some 2Tb QLC NAND devices announced as of May 2025, none of them are actually on the market yet.

Micron, Kioxia/Western Digital, Samsung, SK Hynix, and YMTC all plan to offer 3D QLC devices reaching 2 Tb capacities, typically paired with interface speeds of 3200MT/s – 4800 MT/s over the next few years. Despite the significantly increased layer count, 3D NAND manufacturers are not jumping to capacities higher than 2Tbs per device for the time being, perhaps due to cost concerns.

Rising layer counts: How does each company stack up?

Kicking off with Kioxia and Western Digital, this duo's 3D NAND roadmap featured BiCS 6 with 162 layers across both TLC and QLC variants in the first half of 2023. BiCS 6 represents a mature and commercially proven node, used in mainstream SSDs and enterprise storage. This generation aligns with the industry’s transition toward high-density vertical stacking, while supporting a 2400 MT/s interface speed.

Kioxia and Western Digital didn't stop there, and in the second half of 2024, these companies introduced BiCS 8 in both TLC (BiCS 8T) and QLC (BiCS 8Q) forms, now featuring between 218 and 232 layers. This generation continues to rely on 2400 MT/s – 3600 MT/s interfaces, marking both vertical and performance scaling. Also, it demonstrates Kioxia’s intent to advance QLC’s competitiveness in both storage density and performance.

BiCS 8 will be a fairly long-standing node for Kioxia and Western Digital, as it will be replaced in the first half of 2027. BiCS 9T is set to replace it, boasting a layer count of greater than 300, representing quite an aggressive step forward. This milestone puts Kioxia in alignment with other vendors’ 3D NAND scaling targets, while also introducing 4800 MT/s interface speeds.

Micron’s lineup includes the now legendary B58 IC with 232 layers and a 2400 MT/s data transfer rate. But its 1st Gen ICs featured a lower rate; its full speed was only achieved sometime in the first half of 2023. Nevertheless, the B58 gave Micron an early lead in vertical scaling versus competitors still shipping 162–192 layer products.

In the second half of 2024, Micron advanced to the B68S IC, increasing the layer count to 276. This generation pairs higher density with elevated performance (3600 MT/s), making it a major step in Micron’s 3D NAND roadmap, and making the company one of the leading makers of enthusiast-grade SSDs with the model 4600.

In the first half of 2027, Micron is expected to introduce its B78 3D TLC NAND ICs, with a 4800 MT/s interface. However, the exact layer count is not known. Given the trend from B58 (232L) to B68S (276L), it is reasonable to expect B78 to reach well beyond 300 layers, likely on par with Kioxia’s and Samsung’s leading nodes. However, there are no official materials on exact layer counts, so this remains speculation.

When it comes to 3D NAND makers, Samsung is a rare animal. All producers of flash memory prefer to sell their chips as parts of their own devices, such as SSDs, and to that end, Micron works closely with Silicon Motion and Phison to optimize controllers for its memory and drives. In a similar vein, Kioxia works with Phison. Unlike its rivals, Samsung has its own 3D NAND and controllers to build its SSDs and other products using NAND flash memory. The company also sells its 3D NAND ICs on the open market as an additional boon.

Samsung offered its V8T IC in 2023 H2 with 236 layers, placing it alongside Micron’s B58 and slightly ahead of Kioxia’s BiCS 6. This node continues to be Samsung’s workhorse today.

By the second half of 2025, Samsung is set to mass produce V9T, scaling to 286 layers — a 50-layer jump over V8T. This milestone indicates V9T’s interface speed remains at 3600 MT/s, indicating a controlled ramp before moving to more aggressive performance targets.

Looking ahead to 2026 H1, Samsung’s roadmap lists V10T IC with an expected layer count of over 400, representing the most ambitious vertical target. While this node’s interface speed is also pegged at 4800 MT/s, its standout feature is the sheer layer height, suggesting multi-tier stacking and next-gen integration techniques, such as string stacking and hybrid bonding. However, Samsung has not officially announced that it is using any of those specific techniques quite yet.

SK hynix’s current product lineup includes the V8T IC with 238 layers, a 2400 MT/s interface, and has been available since the second half of 2023, marking their entry into late-Gen 3D NAND scaling. The next major leap occurs with V9T, reaching 321 layers in the first half of 2025, and then increasing interface performance to 3600 MT/s by the second half of 2025.

This shows a rapid vertical scaling effort while improving I/O bandwidth. The company's most ambitious node, V10T, is set to debut in 2027 H1, with 500 layers and a 4800 MT/s interface — matching top-tier bandwidth targets from other vendors, and surpassing them in vertical stack height. The roadmap extends further to V11T (4800 MT/s), though its layer count is not explicitly known.

On the QLC side, SK hynix’s roadmap begins with V7Q in the first half of 2024 at 176 layers, then it extends to V9Q, which delivers 3200 MT/s performance and a 2 Tb die capacity — implying a 300L+ stack. By the first half of 2027, QLC products are also expected to adopt the 500-layer structure (V10Q) at 4800 MT/s, mirroring TLC’s configuration.

When it comes to layer counts, China-based YMTC is not a leader, but its 3D NAND development shows a clear trajectory from mid-tier to high-tier stacking. YMTC’s 3D TLC product (X4-9060) features 128 layers and a 3600 MT/s interface, and was followed quickly by X3-9070 in the second half of 2024. X3-9070 jumped to 232 layers while maintaining the same data transfer rate. This indicates a rapid scaling of vertical density — despite sanctions by the U.S. government. This is likely enabled by the company’s proprietary Xtacking architecture, which separates logic and memory layers to simplify integration. However, no QLC-specific layer counts are known for now.

By 2026 – 2027, YMTC’s roadmap aims to enter the high-performance class of its competitors. The X5-9080 and X5-9070 3D TLC NAND products operate at 4800 MT/s, and the latter is explicitly listed as a 1 Tb die, suggesting a likely move to 300+ layers, although exact counts are not known. Meanwhile, the company’s 3D QLC line (e.g., X4-6080, X5-6080) appears on the roadmap in parallel, also reaching 4800 MT/s by the second half of 2026, hinting at comparable architectural advances.

YMTC’s roadmap outlines a fast-paced rise from 128L to 232L and potentially 300L+ stacking within three years—driven by a balance of aggressive layer scaling and interface speed improvements across both TLC and QLC products.

What's next for 3D NAND?

The future of 3D NAND is defined by fairly aggressive vertical scaling, faster interfaces, and a push toward higher per-die capacities, which will enable products that will enable faster, denser, and more cost-efficient storage across consumer and enterprise segments. To make that happen, all major vendors are set to converge at a 4800 MT/s interface speed and 300–500-layer stacks by 2027.

However, this progress is not without complexity. Vertical scaling introduces new challenges in terms of yield, while higher speeds now also require logic process nodes, which raises manufacturing costs. Eventually, when everyone in 3D NAND manufacturing converges at hybrid bonding (which YMTC already uses, while sporting one of the industry’s widest patent portfolios). These techniques will add another layer of complexity, and companies will require some time to get used to these new processes.

In any case, the future of 3D NAND is bright, as the industry races towards faster speeds, higher stacks, and more complex manufacturing technology.

If you want huge amounts of storage capacity in your PC, laptop, or PlayStation 5 console and don't want to pay the Earth for it, then we have a good deal to highlight today. This 2280 M.2 SSD from SanDisk sports a massive 4TB of capacity, and hits an all-time low price on Amazon (confirmed using CamelCamelCamel's Camelizer price-checking extension). Save $40 off the list price of $269.99 if you purchase this drive today, and bag 4TBs of storage for just $229.99.

The WD_Black SN7100 SSD is the updated version of the WD_Black SN770, which features SanDisk's latest proprietary Polaris 3 controller and 218-layer TLC. The SN7100 sets a new benchmark with its low power consumption and puts in excellent random read performance to boot. Having such a low power consumption level means this drive is a great choice if you're looking for a hardware component that produces less heat and will also be less taxing on devices that rely on battery power.

• Grab the WD_Black 7100 at Amazon

Please take a look at our review of the WD_Black SN7100, where we cover the performance of this drive via our benchmark testing in real-world applications. Perfect for laptops, the SN7100 is a single-sided SSD with the standard 2280 form factor. It has a large 4TB capacity and the latest proprietary Polaris 3 controller combined with SanDisk's 218-Layer TLC (BiCS8) flash NAND. The drive can reach speeds of up to 7250MB/s read and 6900MB/s write. The Sn7100 has an endurance rating of 2,400TBW.

The WD_Black SN7100 is DRAM-less, which can put some people off, as these types of drives tend to slow down the more full the drive gets, but with HMB and SLC improvements, the drive is still plenty fast enough to perform well in devices like the PlayStation 5, where is actually performs exceptionally well. See our charts below, where the SN7100 finishes near the top of the table and even beats out exceptional drives such as the SN850X.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you're upgrading your current setup or building a new rig, a PCIe Gen 4 SSD should be sufficient for most workloads, including gaming. An easily recommended option is the WD Black SN850X SSD, which tops our list of the best SSDs for the PS5 and is currently available at a reduced price on Amazon. The 4TB variant is available at a discounted price of $280, while the 2TB heatsink model is priced at $149 for the Amazon Prime Day sales. If the SN850X isn't up your alley, we also have a more expansive list of the Best SSD deals for Amazon Prime Day.

• SSDs from $59.99 on Amazon Prime Day

The WD Black SN850X is rated for excellent sequential performance, with read speeds of up to 7,300 MB/s and write speeds of up to 6,600 MB/s. It features 112-layer BiCS5 TLC memory with a WD proprietary controller and offers up to 600TB of writes per terabyte of capacity over a five-year period. The drive also features a “Game Mode 2.0” function, which is said to deliver reduced load times and enhance sustained performance during gaming.

The SN850X is fully compatible with the PlayStation 5 and meets Sony’s performance requirements for use as a secondary drive, making it a great option for console gamers. With its included heatsink, you shouldn’t have to worry about thermal throttling during extended gaming sessions.

In our testing of the 2TB variant, we found that the SN850X lags behind the SK Hynix Platinum P41 in almost every 3DMark and PCMark 10 storage benchmark test. Nevertheless, it was consistently faster than competitive drives, such as the Sabrent Rocket 4, Samsung 980 Pro, and the Kingston KC3000.

Similarly, ATTO test results show the SN850X offers strong performance, especially in write tasks, where it surpasses the older SN850. It doesn’t quite match the top-tier Phison E18-based SSDs like the Rocket 4 Plus or Kingston KC3000 in read speeds, it still manages to maintain its lead over other competitors. It also shows gains in small 4KB file transfer performance and benefits slightly from Game Mode, which helps reduce latency a bit.

Testing the drive without a heatsink, it idled at 48 °C, while it hovers between 78 °C and 85 °C during heavy workloads. Essentially, it is recommended to buy the heatsink variant for sustained workloads.

If you're looking for even more options, you can always check out our list of Best SSDs and Best SSDs for the PS5.

We are working hard to find the best computer hardware deals for you this Amazon Prime Day. If you're looking for more savings, check out our Amazon Prime Day deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Ground-breaking ceramic-based data storage outfit Cerabyte has today announced it has received strategic investment from Western Digital, a move it says will accelerate the development of its ceramic data storage tech.

Cerabyte is a German company seeking to revolutionize data storage. It uses ceramic-on-glass material that the company says is good for 5,000 years of data storage.

Not only is Cerabyte's revolutionary tech designed to be essentially permanent, but it could also pave the way for data storage capacities on a scale hitherto unfathomable – Cerabyte says its next-generation active archives combine multiple storage technologies as we head towards the Yottabite era.

Shantnu Sharma, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer, Western Digital, said the company was "looking forward to working with Cerabyte to formulate a technology partnership for the commercialization of this technology," and said its investment in Cerabyte aligns with the company's priority of extending the reach of its products into long-term data storage use cases.

Cerabyte co-founder and CEO Christian Pflaum said, "We are excited to be working with Western Digital to define a technology partnership, fueling our ability to deliver accessible permanent storage solutions at scale.”

Cerabyte made headlines earlier this month by boiling its storage devices in salt water and grilling them in an oven to prove their resilience. The company says its ceramic storage is safe from heat and fire, moisture and water, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and even EMP bursts.

Long-term, Cerabyte hopes to reduce storage costs to less than $1 per TB by 2030, a mind-bending price compared to the current crop of best hard drives.

Neither Cerabyte nor Western Digital has proposed a more concrete timeframe for the launch of its products, simply stating today's newly-minted partnership will "accelerate" development.

An enterprising individual has shared a quick step-by-step guide showing how to convert an old Hard Disk Drive (HDD) into a small but useful variable speed disc sander. The project also requires just a modicum of time, a few simple tools, and a handful of extra components.

If you have been a computing enthusiast for more than a few years, you might have a few unwanted or dead HDDs in your possession. You might also reckon that a disc sander is a useful tool to have, but do not feel that shelling out over $100 on a dedicated device, like this one on Amazon, is worth it. If these two planets align for you, then YouTuber ProShorts101's idea might be the perfect project.

The project starts with a WD Caviar Blue WD1600AAJS. This 2009 vintage HDD offered a meager 160GB of noisy spinning rust storage. We aren't sure if this particular WD1600AAJS was still functional as data storage, but would hope not, as that would upset the gods of retro. While the 7,200 rpm motor in this 3.5-inch device might be one of the better choices available for the intended task, here it is souped-up with a 30 Amp Electronic Speed Controller (ESC), among other components.

On the topic of components, according to ProShorts101, the following list of bits and pieces is required to transmogrify your HDD into a disc sander: an old HDD, a 30A Drone ESC, a servo tester, a 12V socket, and some sand paper.

HDD disc sander maker method

The recently imposed U.S. import duties are designed to affect the vast majority of industries, and the data storage industry is certainly not an exception. Because the underlying technologies of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, tape drives, and storage arrays are so different, the effects of tariffs could be diverse on all of them.

And it looks like HDD and SSD makers will suffer the most despite Trump’s 90-day suspension of country-specific tariffs starting April 10, whereas producers of tapes will rejoice, notes Blocks & Files.

HDDs

We are going to start with hard drives, as these are arguably the most technologically advanced storage devices with the most complex supply chain these days. There are three HDD makers: Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

Seagate's HDD operation involves product development in the U.S. and Singapore; head manufacturing in the United States and Northern Ireland; substrate production in Malaysia; media fabrication in Singapore or Japan (when Seagate sourced platters from Showa Denko); and drive and subassembly manufacturing in China and Thailand.

Toshiba's HDD supply chain involves R&D and high-value component manufacturing in Japan (as the company usually uses media from Showa Denko), with mass assembly and component integration primarily based in China, the Philippines, and Japan (high-end HDDs).

Western Digital develops its HDDs in the U.S. and Japan. Media substrates are produced in Malaysia, but the actual media manufacturing occurs in China or Japan (when Western Digital sources from Showa). Head wafers are processed in the U.S., but the final head-gimbal assembly takes place in the Philippines and Thailand. Actual HDDs are built in Malaysia and Thailand.

Although Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital have different supply chains, their setups are subject to risks of substantial U.S. import tariffs, particularly on drives produced in China (124%), Malaysia (24%), the Philippines (17%), and Thailand (36%). Perhaps, if Toshiba shifts more production to the Philippines, it can avoid paying extremely high tariffs in the U.S., but the situation for Seagate is more complicated as a significant portion of Seagate's drives are built in China. Keeping in mind that HDDs are assembled in cleanrooms, moving their assembly away from China or Thailand quickly will be expensive and complicated.

Considering the diverse supply chains of all three makers, it is likely that U.S. customs will charge import tariffs based on where the final HDDs are assembled. Seagate and Western Digital will likely increase their operations in the U.S. to prove that there is 20% of American content in their drives to cut down duties, though it remains to be seen whether they succeed.

SSDs

With SSDs, the situation is a bit different. There are only six companies in the world that produced 3D NAND memory in high-volume — Kioxia, Micron, Sandisk, Samsung, SK hynix, and YMTC — but there are dozens of SSD makers, most of which conduct operations in China and other countries with low labor costs.

Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk are the only big makers of 3D NAND, which do not have wafer fabrication capacity in China. However, these companies use their Chinese facilities to test and package their flash memory. Under U.S. Customs law, the 'country of origin' is generally determined by the location of the last substantial transformation, the point where the product undergoes a major change. So, if a 3D NAND wafer is fabricated in Japan or Singapore but diced, tested, and packaged in China, the origin of flash is very likely to be considered China.

For now, this is not a problem as memory is now relieved from tariffs. However, Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk produce SSDs in China and drives are considered 'finished goods' and are therefore dutiable. Hence, to avoid punitive tariffs from the U.S. government, these companies will have to start making their drives elsewhere to remain competitive in the U.S. This applies to third-party SSD makers too. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to establish assembly of SSDs as it does not require cleanrooms used to make 3D NAND memory or assemble HDDs.

The lion's share of Samsung's and SK hynix's 3D NAND is made in South Korea, but they also have 3D NAND production capacity in China, mostly to serve local demand for flash memory and SSDs. However, retail SSDs from Samsung and SK hynix are assembled in South Korea, so the U.S. Customs will likely deem them as Korean products subject to a 25% import tariff (a 15% country-specific tariff is suspended for 90 days effective April 10).

For obvious reasons, 3D NAND companies will unlikely ship products containing 3D NAND memory from China to the U.S. to avoid tariffs once semiconductors are slapped with import duties. However, it remains to be seen what SK Hynix's subsidiary Solidigm will do, considering the fact that it exclusively uses memory produced at the company's Dalian facility (which used to belong to Intel). If the U.S. government decides to impose prohibitive tariffs on 3D NAND chips made in China, Solidigm will be in trouble. The same applies to Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk.

To avoid punitive country-specific tariffs when shipping SSDs to the U.S. once the country-specific tariffs are re-instated in 90 days following the April 9 pause, makers of SSDs will have to either assemble them in countries that are not subject to such import duties (e.g., those protected under the USMCA, such as Canada or Mexico), or will have to build them in the U.S. This will not relieve 3D NAND makers (or their customers) from paying import duties on memory and controller chips once they are imposed though. However, unlike makers of HDDs, SSD producers can change the origin of their products relatively easily.

Tape and optical discs

Tape drives and optical discs see different effects. IBM builds LTO tape drives in Arizona and escapes tariffs, aside from imported parts. Japan's Fujifilm makes tape in Massachusetts, so it is also safe, but Sony produces them in Japan, so it must deal with a 24% charge on tapes brought to the U.S.

Blu-ray and DVD discs are manufactured in China, India, Japan, and Taiwan. Each country's specific rate will apply when shipping these items to the U.S. and it is unlikely that anyone will relocate production of discs to America. What remains to be seen is how tariffs affect pre-recorded discs with games and movies.

The WD Black SN770M 2TB is a great choice for expansion cards for smaller computing devices such as the Steam Deck. The SN770M uses a small M.2 2230 form factor, enabling it to fit in the tiniest chassis. So if you're looking to expand the storage of your gaming handheld or laptop, then the WD Black SN770M would be an excellent choice.

Available at Amazon, you can find the 2TB WD Black SN770M on sale for just $177 - although it may not be the lowest price we've seen for this drive, it is still a great deal. The list price for the SN770M is $237, with the Amazon price checking tool (Camelizer) showing the average sales price fluctuating between $190 and $210.

The SN770M SSD has a one-sided design, takes up less space, and is easier to cool. The performance is fast and steady with the combination of Kioxia 112-Layer TLC (BiCS5) NAND and SanDisk 20-82-10081-A1 controller. The 2TB version of the drive has a 1,200 TBW endurance rating and a standard 5-year limited warranty from Western Digital.

For more detailed information and benchmark testing, please see our review of the WD Black SN770M, where we highlight its excellent all-around performance but have concerns about price and thermals when used in desktop mode. The 2TB SN770M has sequential read speeds of 5,150 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 4,850 MB/s - giving you more time in the action and less time on the loading screen.

Don't forget to look at our Amazon coupon codes for April 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Amazon.

Chinese researchers have developed a high-density molecular storage system that uses organic molecules to store and encrypt data, reports Blocks & Files. Information is recorded and retrieved using a specialized atomic force microscope, which manipulates molecular states to store data, according to the description at Nature. While the technology can potentially enable ultra-high-density storage devices that reduce storage space requirements and power consumption (e.g., HDDs with capacities of 100TB and higher), short lifespan of atomic microscope tips remains a major obstacle.

Traditional HDDs store data on magnetic materials that change their properties using magnetic write heads. The molecular HDD technology works by storing and processing data using tiny molecules that change their electrical properties when exposed to voltage. The researchers used 200 self-assembled Ru LPH molecules arranged in a thin monolayer (SAM), where ruthenium ions switch between oxidation state and ion accumulation state, altering the material's conductance using a conductive atomic force microscope (C-AFM) tip. A (C-AFM) tip with a radius of 25nm writes and reads data by applying a small voltage to control these molecular changes, allowing for 96 different conductance states per unit (6-bit storage), which somewhat resembles multi-level cell NAND.

Since this system does not need strong magnetic fields and does not need to heat the medium, it operates with extremely low power consumption (pW/bit range) for reads and writes, which is potentially very efficient for large-scale data storage, according to researchers. However, since the scientists envision usage of their innovations in HDD form-factors with spinning media based on glass substrates, power consumption of actual drives will likely be comparable to that of traditional HDDs as motors will still consume power.

The researchers estimate that the SAM layer has an estimated thickness of ~ 2.54nm. If we assume that each Ru LPH molecule has a similar width and length on the order of a few nanometers, then 200 molecules arranged in a compact monolayer would occupy an area roughly in the range of tens of square nanometers (i.e., 10-20nm in width and length). Napkin math then shows that storing 6-bits of data per 200 self-assembled Ru LPH molecules translates into around 9.6Gbit/inch^2 (keep in mind that the napkin math could be wrong though), which is in line with what HDD makers expect from traditional hard drives heat-assisted writing and bit-patterned media (BPM). Such HDDs featuring HDMR technology are projected to emerge sometimes in the 2030s and enable capacities of over 120 TB per 3.5-inch HDD.

While HDMR has its own peculiarities (e.g., fully patterned medium using a lithography technology), this technology is at least understood by HDD makers, which potentially makes the molecular HDD research obsolete as by the time it may reach maturity and be ready for commercial applications, HDMR will be in mass production. However, the molecular HDD technology seems to have an ace up its sleeve.

Molecular HDDs can implement built-in encryption using bitwise XOR operations. This means the system can securely encode data at the molecular level, preventing unauthorized access. This was demonstrated by encrypting Mogao Grottoes mural images, where each pixel's information was transformed using XOR logic and later decrypted. Additionally, the molecular HDD can perform logical operations like AND, OR, and XOR directly within the storage unit, reducing the need for extra computing power.

Despite its potential, the system has a critical flaw, though - the short operational lifespan of the C-AFM tip. These tips last between 50 and 200 hours when used intermittently and just 5 to 50 hours in continuous mode, according to Blocks & Files. Such a limitation makes long-term, large-scale storage applications impractical unless more durable tips can be developed. If this issue is resolved, molecular storage could match or even surpass the density of next-generation HDDs and archival tape storage. However, for now, significant engineering challenges remain obstacles for it to become a viable alternative to existing storage methods.

One of the largest-capacity consumer SSDs is now more accessible than ever, thanks to a new all-time low price. This deal isn't aimed at anyone building a budget PC, as the over-$500 price tag is still a large outlay. But, if you want a single high-capacity drive for systems with limited M.2 slots or shared PCIe pipelines, going for a big SSD like this is a great choice.

Today's deal sees the 8TB WD Black SN850X fall to $533 at Amazon. This is $26 less expensive than buying two 4TB SN850Xs at their current cost of around $279 each. Just one of these SSDs will beef up the storage capacity of your system for anything from game installs to large video files. The WD Black SN850X is one of the best SSDs for gaming and the PS5, with transfer speeds that almost max out the PCIe Gen 4.0 bandwidth.

This sale price makes it cheaper to get a single 8TB SSD over two smaller 4TB SSDs, which hasn't usually been the case with this drive. The more common pricing we've seen on the 8TB SSDs has made them niche picks for special-use cases thanks to its initial launch pricing of nearly $900.

We reviewed the 8TB WD Black SN850X and found that this no-compromise SSD performed excellently, with sequential read and write speeds of 7,200 MB/s and 6,600 MB/s, respectively. There's a slight drop in write speed of 100 MB/s compared to the smaller capacity SN850X SSDs available, but an increase in random write IOPS of 100K. The 8TB SN850X uses Kioxia 162-Layer TLC (BiCS6) flash memory and the proprietary Triton MP16+ B2 controller.

Don't forget to look at our Amazon coupon codes for February 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Amazon.

Western Digital is set to introduce its first hard drives featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, and around 2030, this technology will enable the company to build 80TB–100TB HDDs. At that point, FePt-based granular media will start reaching its limits in terms of areal density. But Western Digital is already working on the next step for its hard drives: heat dot magnetic recording (HDMR) technology.

The HDMR is a next-generation recording technology that involves heat-assisted writing and bit-patterned media (BPM) that promises to achieve areal densities of around 8 Tb/inch^2 and beyond (according to Seagate) and to enable 10-platter HDDs with capacities of 120TB or higher. This technology is projected to be quite expensive as bit-patterned disks must be physically patterned using lithography or etching equipment in cleanrooms. Let us talk about this development in more detail.

All modern HDDs use platters featuring a granular magnetic coating. In such media, grains vary slightly in size, shape, and exact positioning, which introduces noise and interference and limits how tightly bits (and tracks) can be packed. To read tracks reliably, HDD makers use specially designed two-dimensional (2D) read heads, which consist of two read heads. Disks used in Western Digital’s 10-platter 24TB HDDs with conventional magnetic recording and ePMR 2 feature an areal density of around 1.2 Tb/inch^2. Seagate’s 10-platter 30TB hard drive, which uses HAMR and FePt media, has an areal density of around 1.5 Tb/inch^2. Seagate believes that granular FePt (or other high-anisotropy media) will enable the industry to achieve areal densities of 4 Tb/inch^2 or possibly even 6 Tb/inch^2.

At around 5 Tb/inch^2, it will become harder not only to read granular media reliably but also to write to it, which will push the industry to move on to ordered-granular (OG) media that incorporates patterning in one dimension (according to Seagate). OG media is expected to feature grains of uniform size, placed at precise, repeatable intervals. This allows the write head to form data bits with tighter boundaries and less noise. OG media will require new magnetic coatings, but its benefits will be significant—with uniform grains, magnetic properties become more predictable, reducing variations in write/read performance.

However, ordered-granular media is expected to support areal densities of up to approximately 7 Tb/inch^2. To reach 8 Tb/inch^2, bit-patterned media—which physically carves the disk into isolated bits using lithography or other processes—will be needed. BPM represents a more radical shift in manufacturing and entails significant production costs.

Combining the physical isolation of bits (from BPM) with energy-assisted writing (from HAMR) in HDMR can push areal densities far beyond what either approach alone can achieve. This may explain why Seagate does not reveal its areal density expectations for this technology. However, BPM requires a complex patterning process (e.g., nanoimprint lithography, e-beam lithography, or highly sophisticated etching), which is expensive. Additionally, local heating must be extremely precise — too much heat affects adjacent dots, while too little results in write failures — so new types of lasers will need to be developed.

Given all the complexities associated with HDMR, this technology will not come to the market anytime soon. Western Digital expects it to arrive sometime in the next decade, at which point it will enable HDDs with capacities well over 100TB. Interestingly, the latest iteration of Western Digital's roadmap no longer mentions ordered-granular media, unlike its 2022 version. It is possible that this time, the company intends to move directly to the technology that delivers the best results.

Western Digital this week outlined its future hard disk drive technology roadmap and revealed plans to adopt heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for its HDDs beginning in late 2026. HAMR will enable the company to build 80TB–100TB HDDs by 2030. 

Western Digital's first HAMR-based HDDs will be introduced sometime in 2026, with a 36TB capacity for conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and a 44TB capacity for shingled UltraSMR recording. The company expects these drives to be qualified by its customers among cloud data center providers by late 2026, which is when Western Digital will begin its volume production. The company plans to commence volume shipments of its HAMR drives in the first half of 2027. 

Right now, two CSPs are already test-driving Western Digital's HAMR-based HDDs, though the company declines to disclose their capacity and whether they are used in the CMR or SMR versions. 

“The plan is to transition to HAMR, starting at 36TB with CMR recording technology, and 44TB with UltraSMR,” said Irving Tam, Chief Executive Officer of Western Digital, at the company's Investor Day 2025. “We anticipate that we will complete qualification for this HAMR product by the end of the calendar year 2026 and then transition to shipping in volume during the first half of 2027. It's not that we are just starting with HAMR today; we have been engaging with our customers on HAMR for quite a while now. [We] already have two hyperscale customers that are testing our HAMR drives today.” 

Western Digital expects its HDDs featuring HAMR technology to evolve over the years. For now, the company envisions 80TB CMR HDDs and 100TB UltraSMR drives around 2030. That evolution will not be enabled by HAMR alone but also by the company's other technologies, including OptiNAND, an increased number of platters, and mechanical improvements. By the end of the decade, there will be HDDs that can store more than twice as much data as current hard drives. 

It is worth noting that Western Digital's path to HAMR has been convoluted, to say the least. Energy-assisted magnetic recording has been discussed for years, but Seagate and Western Digital only began discussing its commercialization in the mid-2010s. While Seagate has been a strong supporter of HAMR, Western Digital publicly committed to microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) — which uses a spin torque oscillator to generate microwaves that reduce the magnetic coercivity of the write head's location to enable narrow and stable tracks — in 2017. 

At some point, Western Digital realized that the energy produced by the spin torque oscillator was enough to change the magnetic coercivity of its media and decided to use this discovery to develop energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology for commercial products starting in 2019. By late 2021, the company ceased to mention MAMR. However, Western Digital then made significant advancements with its write heads and ultimately developed ePMR 2 technology, which enables the company's leading-edge 26TB CMR and 32TB UltraSMR HDDs.

Now that the company has set launch and volume production windows for its HAMR-based HDDs, it's likely safe to say that MAMR will never materialize, and HAMR will be Western Digital's future.

Intevac, a maker of thin-film processing systems, has disclosed that it had landed orders from another customer for a machine that processes magnetic films for HAMR media. Intevac hasn't disclosed which company will field the drives, but logic dictates that either Toshiba or Western Digital is gearing up to begin producing hard drives based on the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. 

Having landed orders for its HAMR-capable upgrade for its Lean 200 platform from the second major customer, Intevac now expects its HDD division to generate around $200 million in revenue over the next three years, fueled by the industry-wide adoption of HAMR technology. The company expects demand for high-capacity HDDs from data centers and the AI industry. 

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ HAMR-based HDDs use glass platters coated with a magnetic film, such as an iron-platinum alloy (FePt). Data is recorded by heating the magnetic film with a laser to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity. Since the magnetic coating of HAMR media is different from the magnetic coating of perpendicular magnetic recording media, Intervac's Lean 200 tool, used to process thin films, must be upgraded. 

Apparently, either Toshiba or Western Digital has ordered such upgrades, and initial upgrade installations have been successfully completed. Both companies have HAMR hard drives in their roadmaps.  

For now, Toshiba uses FC-MAMR (flux-controlled – microwave-assisted magnetic recording) technology for its MG-series HDDs that offer capacities of up to 24TB. The company intends to adopt MAS-MAMR (microwave-assisted switching – microwave-assisted magnetic recording) for its next-generation HDDs with 26TB – 30TB capacities. After that, the company plans to adopt HAMR, which will happen with 35TB hard drives. However, it is not completely clear when this will happen as the company is behind its HDD roadmap published in 2022. 

As for Western Digital, it did announce in mid-2023 that its HAMR-based HDDs would enter mass production in 1.5 years. This year, the company started sampling its 32TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, which will ramp up in calendar 2025. It is possible that the company's next-generation HDDs that Western Digital will sample next year will indeed be HAMR-based, so it is about time for the company to start prepping its equipment for making HAMR HDDs.

Users looking to maximize the value of their HDD storage, especially for NAS usage, may be interested to hear that the WD Red Plus 10TB NAS HDD is now available for just $146 from Adorama— an awesome discount from its original MSRP of $279.

At this price, you're paying roughly 1.6 cents per Gigabyte before shipping, which is pretty good— particularly if you're looking to utilize the WD Red's NAS-centric features, which include far lower power consumption and operating temperatures for safe, continuous operation.

WD Red Plus NAS HDDs are optimized for low power consumption and low operating temperature to ensure safe, 24/7 operation. This WD Red Plus 10TB also comes with a 3-year limited warranty, which should help protect against any undue drive failures.

Some of the WD Red Plus 10TB's most important failure prevention features include built-in RAID error recovery control (further enhancing RAID support over standard HDDs), as well as noise and vibration protection enhanced by Rotation Vibration sensors that "anticipate and proactively counteract disturbances caused by increased vibration often found in multi-bay NAS systems".

The drive is rated to operate at speeds of up to 216 MB/s with its 7200RPM, achieving a workload of up to 180TB/year, with an estimated 1 million hours (~114 years) mean time between drive failures— which should mean the drive has a long life ahead of it, though, of course, WD only guarantees three years in its warranty policy.

Last year, we reviewed a sibling drive to this model— the WD Red Plus 12 TB instead of the 10TB model. In that review, we praised its core features and matching 256 MB cache. Among NAS HDDs, these WD Red Plus drives are admittedly entry-level, but the price for capacity speaks for itself.

We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

A little less than a year ago Western Digital announced plans to split its business into two: one would concentrate on hard disk drives, and another would get 3D NAND assets, including the production of memory and related products. Recently the company quietly split its websites: those who want to get an HDD should go to WD.com and those after flash storage should visit SanDisk.com, as noted in a Reddit post. 

As a result of the split, all the company's hard drive products are now available at WD.com, including those that traditionally belonged to Western Digital's family of WD-branded devices as well as G-Technology's external HDDs that over time gained their SanDisk Professional badge. SanDisk, on the other hand, sells all types of 3D NAND flash-based products. We are talking about memory cards, USB drives, and products extending to enterprise-grade SSDs - even those that currently carry the WD trademark. 

In addition to splitting product lines, Western Digital will also split support. Western Digital will keep supporting all HDDs, while SanDisk will keep supporting all NAND-based products.  

"As of today, we are operating two specialized websites: WesternDigital.com for all HDD and platform products and SanDisk.com for all flash products–including SSDs, memory cards, USB flash drives, and more," a statement by Western Digital reads. "In addition, we now have two specialized support websites. Western Digital Support will continue to support all HDDs and platform products while SanDisk Support will support all flash products from the Western Digital family of brands." 

The formal split of Western Digital was set to be completed in the second half of 2024, so it will probably occur over the next several weeks. Since announcing the split in October 2023, Western Digital has made considerable headway, including establishing legal entities across 18 countries and preparing necessary financial structures, the company announced in March. Western Digital also indicated back then that regulatory filings were nearing completion. Once complete, both companies will operate as publicly traded entities with their own capital structures. 

David Goeckeler, the current CEO, will lead the new NAND-focused company, possibly named SanDisk. Irving Tan, currently the executive vice president of global operations, will become the CEO of the standalone HDD company, which will continue to operate under the Western Digital brand. 

The decision to divide the company stems from challenges in managing its diverse product lines and lagging growth in a highly competitive market. Western Digital had become a vertically integrated storage company after acquiring SanDisk and HGST but struggled to grow revenues, especially as demand for hard drives waned and the NAND market became more volatile. This separation is intended to improve operational focus and create two independent, more agile companies.

The Board of Investment (BOI) of the Kingdom of Thailand has approved Western Digital's plan to expand its hard disk drive production facility in the country. If Western Digital proceeds with this plan, this will be the first significant expansion of its HDD production capacity in years.

In total, Western Digital plans to invest ฿23 billion ($689 million) in the expansion of its 'HDD production and related equipment operations' in Bang Pa-In Industrial Estate, Ayutthaya Province, and 304 Industrial Park in Prachinburi Province, as noted by The Register. Western Digital has been operating in Thailand since 1997, employing over 28,000 people. The expansion will create over 10,000 jobs for Thai personnel and benefit related businesses by utilizing domestic raw materials such as electronic circuit boards (PCBA), metal and plastic parts, and PSUs.

The formal approval of the BOI does not necessarily mean that Western Digital will proceed with the plan and expand its HDD production facilities in Thailand. Western Digital has not made any announcements on the matter, either through a press release or filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Unit sales of hard drives have been declining for about a decade as client PCs adopted solid-state drives. In contrast, operators of cloud data centers prefer to get the highest-capacity hard drives to install multiple low or mid-range HDDs. To that end, both Seagate and Western Digital have been closing down excessive hard drive production capacities. However, demand for high-capacity hard drives has increased in recent years due to demand from traditional cloud data centers and emerging AI data centers.

"This expansion is aimed at supporting the increasing demand for efficient data storage and processing systems driven by the growth of cloud technology and data centers," a press release by Thailand's BOI reads. "Thailand remains a leading global hard disk production base."

Indeed, as both Seagate and Western Digital assemble their HDDs in Thailand, the country accounts for 80% of the global hard drive production.

It should be noted that Western Digital is splitting the company into a maker of HDDs and a producer of NAND flash and SSDs. Before the company is divided, it is unlikely that Western Digital will make significant investments in production capacities. We cannot exclude this possibility as the HDD company must be positioned for growth.

Kioxia has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, aiming for an October debut, reports Nikkei. The NAND flash maker aims to raise at least $500 million and could be valued at over $10 billion, according to Financial Times. Even after the IPO, the company will be controlled by Bain Capital, SK hynix, and Toshiba. 

Kioxia, the world's third largest supplier of NAND flash memory based on its performance in Q1 2024, as reported by TrendForce, has been seeking an IPO for a while and now that there is interest in stocks associated with the AI boom, it is time for its owners to capitalize on this. The company is currently 56% owned by a special-purpose entity created by Bain Capital and SK hynix (which can control up to 15% of Kioxia), while Toshiba retains a 41% stake. Both Bain and Toshiba intend to gradually reduce their stakes following Kioxia's public listing. 

This IPO marks Kioxia's second attempt to go public. The company had initially planned to list in 2020, but uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and China led to a postponement. The decision to proceed now reflects an improved business climate and strong financial performance from Kioxia, which reported a record net profit of ¥69.8 billion ($477 million) in Q2 2024 and then ended production cutting. 

Last year Kioxia attempted to merge with Western Digital's NAND and SSD business. The goal was to create a strong contender against the current market leader Samsung, but the plan was halted due to objections of SK hynix.  

Despite its strong financials, Kioxia's $10.3 billion valuation is expected to be at a discount compared to Samsung and Western Digital. This discount reflects the company's position in the market (largely caused by its production-cutting tactics), its debt levels, and the need to offer attractive pricing to entice both global and domestic investors. 

Kioxia's IPO will occur amid Western Digital's split into two companies: a NAND and SSD maker and a hard drive maker. After the split, Western Digital's NAND company will control around 12% of the global NAND memory supply, leaving Kioxia with another 12%. The two companies will be considerably behind Samsung and SK hynix, and even if they had merged, they would only be comparable to SK hynix in terms of NAND market share.

TrendForce's latest report indicates that spot prices for both DRAM and NAND flash memory are unlikely to increase soon due to two reasons. First, there's plenty of inventory on the market. Second, the Chinese government's recent actions against smuggling of refurbished DRAMs has had a further effect on DRAM prices. 

In the DRAM market, spot prices continue decline, in a stark contrast to contract prices. This happens because of excessive inventory levels at module houses, which tend to buy DRAMs on the spot market. Also, weak consumer product markets contribute to the declining prices as makers of hardware do not need more memory than they already have and do not by on the spot market. 

Another major factor that contributes to the decline is the crackdown on smuggling in the Chinese market, which has caused reballed DRAM chip prices to drop further. Reballing is a technique used to repair DRAM chips by replacing the solder balls on the chip's underside, which are used to connect the chip to a circuit board. In many cases, this makes them work again, but such chips are not as reliable as new DRAM. 

Back to pricing. Since the end of May an average spot price of DDR4 1Gx8 2666MT/s chip decreased by 2.54%, falling from $1.881 to $1.835 in the past week alone. While the decreases may not seem significant, they are consistent. 

Similarly, the spot NAND flash market is experiencing weak transactions due to sufficient inventory levels at SSD makers (some of which produce the world's best SSDs), preventing a revival of demand despite price reductions by spot suppliers. This has already led to a continued divergence between spot and contract prices. Also, there is uncertainty regarding potential demand for inventory replenishment in Q3 2024. Notably, the spot price of a 512Gb 3D TLC NAND wafer dropped by 0.57% this week, reaching $3.309. 

In general, both DRAM and NAND flash sport memory markets face significant challenges in terms of pricing due to soft demand. TrendForce does not expect price recoveries in the short term due to market dynamics and external pressure, such as government crackdowns. 

Just earlier this week we reported that Kioxia ceased cutting production of its 3D NAND memory and is set to increase output, potentially to boost market share. This move alone could have major implications on 3D NAND supply and price.

In a rather unexpected turn of events, Western Digital (WD) has teased the industry's first 2Tb 3D QLC NAND device at an investor conference ahead of its official announcement. The new flash memory could potentially reshape the high-capacity solid-state drives market, enabling much faster and larger SSDs that consume less power. The device uses the proven 218-layer BiCS8 production node and is so tiny it can fit on a fingertip. WD also shared plenty of comparative performance data, touting power, density, and I/O performance gains over competing flash.

"I am really excited to share with you a preview of the BiCS8 2Tb 3D QLC die," said Robert Soderbery, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Western Digital's Flash Business. "We have designed this die to meet the data center and AI storage needs. We are going to shortly announce this product, but I want to share it with you today. This happens to be the world's highest-capacity memory die."

A 2Tb (256GB) 3D QLC NAND die is indeed a huge achievement, as the 'base' product that Western Digital introduced on its 218-layer BiCS8 production technology is a 1Tb 3D TLC device. At this point, we have no idea about the exact architecture of the 2Tb IC, such as the speed of its interface (it is probably fast), or the number of planes, or its latency. However, the company did share detailed comparative performance and power metrics (below), and given the fact that the company positions the device for data centers in general and AI storage needs in particular, one can make some assumptions about its performance targets. 

Now, a 256GB 3D QLC NAND device would allow manufacturers to build a 1TB SSD using just four memory ICs and a 2TB drive using eight devices, which greatly lowers their costs. Creating a 16-die package would enable a stunning 4TB in a single chip package.

Thus, assuming that Western Digital (and its manufacturing partner Kioxia) can produce these 2Tb 3D QLC NAND ICs in high volume and with decent yields, the new device can redefine the cost of high-capacity solid-state drives.

As you can see in the album above, WD says its QLC die density is 15 to 19% denser than the competition. It also claims to be 50% faster than competing NAND (I/O speed) while requiring 13% less power to program per gigabyte of data than competitors. You can also see the method the company uses to create the die — WD creates a die with only the CMOS control circuitry and another with the stacked memory cells, then flips the latter over and bonds the two devices together using hybrid bonding technology (much like Chinese fab YMTC's Xtacking tech).

"We typically show you a wafer, but I felt like the view of a wafer does not quite convey what we have achieved," said Sodebery. "So, if you allow me for a quick second, I want to show you the die. I have one here. Please zoom in [on] what I am holding on my finger here. This is the size of the die, much smaller than my fingertip." 

Western Digital plans to formally announce its 2Tb 3D QLC NAND device soon, so we'll likely learn more detailed specifications soon.

Western Digital this week introduced a series of 6TB external hard drives based on 2.5-inch HDDs, which highlights the first new capacity point for this hard disk drive form factor in about seven years. There is a catch, though: the HDD is slow and will unlikely fit into any mobile PCs, so it looks like it will exclusively serve portable and specialized storage products.

Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external storage devices and is not available separately. All of these drives (excluding the already very thick G-Drive ArmorATD) are thicker than their 5 TB predecessors, which may suggest that in a bid to increase the HDD's capacity, the manufacturer simply installed another platter and made the whole drive thicker instead of developing new platters with a higher areal density.

While this is a legitimate way to expand the capacity of a hard drive, it is necessary to note that 5TB 2.5-inch HDDs already feature a 15-mm z-height, which is the highest standard z-height for 2.5-inch form-factor storage devices. As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC.

When it comes to specifications of the latest My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs, Western Digital only discloses that they offer up to 130 MB/s read speed (just like their predecessors), feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5 GT/s) interface using either a modern USB Type-C or Micro USB Type-B connector and do not require an external power adapter.

Western Digital does not disclose whether its 6TB My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs rely on shingled magnetic recording (SMR), like predecessors, or conventional magnetic recording (CMR), but we suppose that we are dealing with SMR drives. Their read performance and increased thickness suggest that the manufacturer added another platter with a similar areal density as that on lower-capacity HDDs, which may be more evidence that we are dealing with SMR. That said, expect particularly low performance when re-writing the data on such drives.

Western Digital said that the new drives are now available for retail purchase. The WD My Passport Ultra and WD My Passport Ultra for Mac with USB-C are priced at $199.99 each, and the WD My Passport and WD My Passport for Mac are available for $179.99. 

The WD My Passport Works With USB-C is $184.99, while the gaming-oriented WD_Black P10 Game Drive is also $184.99. The SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD retails for $229.99. All of Western Digital's external storage drives come with a three-year limited warranty.

Do you already own a NAS drive or maybe looking to build one? If you're looking to replace or boost your current storage drives, then this deal from Western Digital on the WD Red Pro 14TB Hard Disk Drive may be of interest to you.

You can save $180 off the total price when you purchase two WD Red Pro 14TB HDDs - getting them for just $439. Without the deal, the price would be $619. To take advantage of this sale, select the drive size and make sure you add two of them before going to checkout and there you will see the new calculated price.

The WD Red Pro 14TB HDD has a 512MB cache and is rated for 550TB/year workloads and up to 2.5M hours MTBF.

WD Red Pro hard drives are built to be more reliable. These are not your average consumer drives as they've been designed and engineered to be more rigorous and cope with vibrations, small shocks, and continuous operation. Whether for consumer or small business use, NAS drives are often accessible 24/7 and need drives that are up to the task. 

One of the big selling points of the WD Red Pro NAS Drives is that they also come with a 5 year limited warranty from Western Digital. So if something goes wrong with one of your drives, there's plenty of support from WD to get you back up and running.

Kioxia plans to mass produce 3D NAND memory with over 1,000 layers by 2031, according to the company's chief technology officer (CTO), Hidefumi Miyajima, reports Xtech Nikkei. During his lecture at the 71st Applied Physics Society Spring Meeting at Tokyo City University, Miyajima discussed the technical challenges and solutions for achieving over 1000 layers in a 3D NAND device.

Increasing the number of active layers in a 3D NAND device is the best way to boost the recording density of flash memory nowadays, so all 3D NAND makers strive to do this with new process nodes every 1.5 to 2 years. Each new node brings several challenges, as 3D NAND makers have to increase the number of layers and shrink NAND cells both laterally and vertically. This process requires manufacturers to adopt new materials with every new node, which is a major research and development challenge.

Today, Kioxia's best 3D NAND device is 8th Generation BiCS 3D NAND memory with 218 active layers and a 3.2 GT/s interface (first introduced in March 2023). This generation introduces a novel CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) architecture, which involves separate manufacturing of the 3D NAND cell array wafers and I/O CMOS wafers using the most suitable process technology and bonding them together. The result is a product with enhanced bit density and improved NAND I/O speed, which ensures that the memory can be used to build the best SSDs. 

Meanwhile, specifics about the CBA architecture, such as whether the I/O CMOS wafers include additional NAND peripheral circuitry like page buffers, sense amplifiers, and charge pumps, have not been disclosed by Kioxia and its manufacturing partner Western Digital. By producing memory cells and peripheral circuits separately, manufacturers can leverage the most efficient process technologies for each component, leading to further advantages as the industry progresses towards methods like string stacking, which will certainly be used for 1,000-layer 3D NAND. 

It should be noted that Samsung also expects to achieve production-level 1,000-layer 3D NAND.

Western Digital's latest SSD with QLC technology boasts better performance in both reads and writes than its TLC-based predecessor (via ComputerBase). The company's newest SN5000S drive, despite using generally slow QLC NAND flash, is 16.5% faster in reads and 15.5% faster in writes compared to the TLC-based SN740.

The PC SN5000S is Western Digital's latest mainstream consumer SSD, available in the M.2 2280 "gumstick" and the small PC-compatible M.2 2230 form factors, with up to 2TB of storage. It essentially replaces the PC SN740 series, which is offered in the same capacities and form factors.

The SN5000S 2TB is 16.5% faster in reads and 15.5% faster in writes compared to the SN740 2TB. The SN740 1TB is slightly faster in writes, and the SN5000S's lead drops to a still respectable 14.3%. The SN5000S 2TB also has an extra 100TB worth of endurance compared to its predecessor, though it is worth noting that the 1TB model of the SN5000S only has 300TBW of endurance to the SN740 1TB's 400TBW. Additionally, the SN5000S uses a little more power at peak than the SN740.

Fundamentally, QLC NAND is in last place when it comes to performance compared to other types of NAND. This is because QLC stores four bits per cell, while other technologies store less. SLC stores one bit per cell, MLC has two, and TLC uses three, with fewer bits generally translating into more performance and endurance. While having more bits increases data density, reading and writing more bits often leads to less performance and more wear and tear on the NAND itself.

However, there are ways to improve the performance of QLC and other multi-bit types of NAND. Perhaps the most crucial method is employing an SLC cache. Although QLC has four bits available to fill, an SSD doesn't necessarily need to fill those bits when writing data. SSDs can perform much better by designating a portion of their cells as pseudo-SLC. Of course, this only works with completely empty cells, and SSDs that use pseudo-SLC need to consolidate data down into fewer cells to make this sustainable.

Despite the issues with QLC (and other multi-bit NAND), storage manufacturers like Samsung are interested in developing it further. Since consumers don't necessarily need the best performance or endurance and generally prioritize having lots of storage, QLC can often be the most cost-effective solution for the mainstream. SLC's low data density makes it more suitable for servers, where the raw performance and high endurance are far more useful.

Huawei says its new data storage device, the OceanStor Arctic, will significantly reduce cost and power usage compared to traditional storage technologies such as hard drives and tapes, according to a report from Block and Files. The device is based on the so-called magneto-electric disk (MED) technology, which could revolutionize the storage market — if Huawei manages to produce such disks in volumes. However, the company is keeping details of the mysterious new type of storage product under wraps for now, so it hasn't outlined the details behind the tech. 

MED technology from Huawei will reportedly offer a rack capacity exceeding 10PB with a power consumption of less than 2kW. The product will be available internationally in the first half of 2025. The company also highlighted the technology's ability to lower total connection cost by 20% when compared to tape storage, and reduce power consumption by a staggering 90% in comparison to conventional hard drives. 

The numbers presented by Huawei look quite impressive, as today, a typical 42U rack can house up to 288 HDDs, which can store up to 8.64PB of data (assuming it's equipped with Seagate's shiny new 30TB HDDs featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)). The power consumption of such a rack would be around 2.88kW, assuming that an HDD consumes 10W. There are 4U storage servers, such as the ASRock Rack 4U100-C612, that can house 100 3.5-inch hard drives and thus store up to 3PB of data at 1kW. 10 such machines would store a whopping 30PB — much better than Huawei's technology when it comes to capacity. However, such a rack would consume a lot of power. 

Huawei provided little information about its upcoming OceanStor Arctic. Since the technology is a magneto-electric disk (MED), not a magneto-electric drive, we are dealing with something that has magnetic platters with tracks (and probably spins). The underlying principle of MED technology seems to be the magneto-electric effect, which creates a connection between the magnetic and electric properties of a material. We don't know how this applies to rotating disks. 

Given the description, one of the first technologies that comes to mind is Western Digital's energy-assisted magnetic recording, which is used in various of the company's hard drives. Huawei's disks' exact form factor is unclear. Also, we're not sure how Huawei can achieve 90% reduced power consumption compared to HDDs using a rotating media technology.

The introduction of MED storage marks a significant milestone in general, however, as no existing MED storage products are on the market. 

Japanese 3D NAND maker Kioxia has proposed a deal to its investor SK Hynix (which also happens to be its rival 3D NAND maker from South Korea), offering it to produce non-volatile memory at Kioxia's fabs in Japan, Reuters reports citing Jiji news agency. This move aims to make SK Hynix change its mind regarding Kioxia's merger plan with Western Digital. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether SK Hynix gets interested.

The negotiations between Kioxia and Western Digital had come to a halt last year when SK Hynix, a South Korean company, expressed opposition to forming a large 3D NAND memory chip conglomerate between the American and Japanese companies. SK Hynix had reasons to stop the merger because Kioxia and Western Digital would create a player massively larger than SK Hynix.

To overcome this obstacle and secure SK Hynix's support, Kioxia has suggested allowing SK Hynix to use its Japanese 3D NAND fabs operated jointly by Kioxia and Western Digital for chip production. This strategic offer is intended to pave the way for the merger's approval, ultimately creating a large player in the global 3D NAND memory chip market.

With some extra capacity from Kioxia, SK Hynix could significantly boost its 3D NAND memory output without investing in expanding its fabs or building new ones, which seems like an attractive deal in general. Meanwhile, the financial terms of such a deal are entirely unknown.

The combined company between Kioxia and Western Digital would control roughly one-third (31.4%) of the global 3D NAND market by revenue, according to Q3 2023 market shares tracked by TrendForce. This is significantly higher than SK Hynix's share of 20.2% and is comparable to Samsung's share of 31.4%. Meanwhile, even if part of Kioxia's (or instead the merged entity's) production capacity goes to SK Hynix, the new company will likely be larger than the South Korean memory giant, which is why the latter may still consider it a significant threat.

It should be noted that neither Kioxia nor SK Hynix have confirmed talks about capacity, so the information should be taken with a grain of salt.

Japan's industry ministry announced that it will be adding more subsidies for Kioxia and Western Digital, promising 242.9 billion yen (US$ 1.64 billion) to build two state-of-the-art facilities to mass produce NAND memory chips and fulfil the needs for AI and data center applications. This includes 92.9 billion in subsidies previously approved in 2022, so there's an additional 150 billion yen overall.

Once construction is completed in the Mie and Iwate prefecture, the facilities will make 218-layer 3D NAND chips for the respective markets. The ministry believes that with this investment, it would reclaim its reputation as a major chip manufacturing hub.

This will also enable the country to secure chip supply as trade relations between China and the United States remain tense. Industry Minister Ken Saito told Reuters, "The more data is used, the more memory consumption will increase so in that sense global demand will surely grow in accordance with NAND's characteristics." He also stated, "Japan and the US will work together to fulfil the responsibility of supplying memory products needed by the world."

Western Digital and Kioxia were planning to merge a few months ago, but SK Hynix objected a few days after the announcement as the proposal would undervalue its investment, leading to the merger plans being cancelled the next day. Regardless, Japan has had its own goals in place with these companies since 2022, so it increased the subsidies to help overcome the downturn in the NAND market that occurred last year.

A gold rush in the NAND market?

The need for higher-performing and higher-capacity memory has always created a certain demand from the worldwide market, but with the ever-growing use of generative AI and data centers around the world, the demands must be met. Japan also believes that it will generate 9,000 jobs in the region as a result of this investment.

It's common for countries to subsidize and invest in manufacturing facilities for leading companies. Through these plants, shipments are expected to begin in September 2025, though experts believe it could take longer.

The United States has also been doing the same with Intel, Samsung, and SK Hynix. Under the CHIPS Act, Samsung and SK Hynix can only operate their existing facilities in China, while newer facilities will be made in the United States. Intel and TSMC are also getting subsidies from the United States for near-future plants. The U.S will also be a major hub for GPU packaging, as Nvidia will also be using Intel's foundry for GPU packaging production.

Japan, the U.S., and other countries are all aiming to boost chip manufacturing facilities in their respective regions, aiming to dramatically decrease dependency on plants located in China. But even with sanctions, China is making its plans to secure its future in generative AI applications for multiple fields, though Intel CEO Gelsinger claims China will remain ten years behind for the foreseeable future.

Western Digital stated it had started volume shipment of its Ultrastar DC HC580 and WD Gold 24TB hard disk drives that use conventional magnetic recording, as well as volume production start of its Ultrastar DC HC680 28TB HDDs that rely on shingled magnetic recording. The drives are designed for a wide-variety of datacenter applications, including cloud, enterprise, exascale, and enterprise. The 24TB WD Gold drives will shortly hit retail.

The new HDDs are not only among the highest-capacity hard drives available today (or announced to date), but they are also very fast by HDD standards: the maximum data transfer rate is up to 298 MB/s (WD Gold, DC HC580), and their sustained data transfer rate is up to 265 MB/s (DC HC680). As far as power consumption is concerned, they are rated for 5.5W idle and 6.8W – 9.8W operational (50/50 read/write), which is more or less in line with their predecessors. Given the higher capacity of the new drives amid similar power consumption, their terabyte-per-Watt power efficiency is said to be 10% - 12% higher compared to previous-generation HDDs, which is good news for power-limited datacenters.

The new Ultrastar DC HC580 and WD Gold 24TB hard drives are based on the company's proven 10-disk enterprise-grade platform, with a 7200-RPM spindle speed that relies on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) and features the company's proprietary OptiNAND enhancements to boost performance in real-world applications. The Ultrastar DC HC680 28TB uses shingled recording on some bands to further increase capacity of the drive, yet at the cost of the peculiarities associated with this recording method, such as very slow re-write speeds, and the necessity to optimize software for these HDDs.

"We are seeing strong momentum for Western Digital’s SMR HDDs and believe that SMR adoption will continue to grow as their new 28TB SMR HDD offers the next compelling TCO value proposition that cloud customers cannot ignore," said Ed Burns, research director of HDD and storage technologies at IDC.

Being datacenter HDDs, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC HC and WD Gold are rated for a 550TB annual workload and feature numerous enhancements to ensure that they work predictably and reliably in multi drive high-density storage environments, which includes top- and bottom-attached motors, rotational vibration sensors, enhanced read/write heads, and appropriate firmware.

The WD Gold 24 TB HDDs are shipping to the channel and interested parties among enterprises and SMBs. Cloud service providers, hyperscalers, and server OEMs are validating and qualifying the Ultrastar DC HC680 28TB and HC580 24TB HDDs with a SATA interface, so expect their deployment and availability in a few months. As for SAS versions of the Ultrastar DC HC680 and HC580 drives, expect their availability in the first quarter of 2024.

Western Digital denied that some of its SanDisk Pro and other external SSD fail because of a hardware problem, as stated by the head of Attingo, a data recovery company, last week. In a statement released to PetaPixel, Western Digital claimed that it ensures product quality through a thorough design for manufacturing process, adherence to IPC standards for PCB design and assembly, use of high-quality solder paste, and extensive pre-shipment testing.

"The recent statements suggest that hardware components may have been responsible for the firmware issue that impacted certain SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, SanDisk Extreme 4TB, and WD My Passport SSD 4TB portable SSDs earlier this year," a statement by Western Digital reads. "While we are working to gather more information, at this time we do not believe hardware issues played a role in the product concerns that we successfully addressed with the firmware update."

Markus Häfele, Managing Director of Attingo, a data recovery company with over 25 years of data recovery experience, told an Austrian website that his company encounters failed SanDisk Extreme, SanDisk Extreme Pro, and WD My Passport SSD. Western Digital is even facing a class action lawsuit because of these failures.

Häfele noted multiple hardware issues with these drives, including mismatches between the size of the components and the circuit boards they are attached to. This mismatch leads to unstable connections and overheating, which in turn makes the SSDs more susceptible to damage. Furthermore, the solder used in these devices tends to form bubbles, compromising its integrity and leading to easy breakage. The root cause of actual failures — whether it is the low-quality solder, the inappropriately sized components, or a combination of both — remains unclear, but the drives fail because their hardware fails.

Specialists from Attingo observed that recent versions of these SSDs have been altered by adding extra epoxy resin, presumably to better secure the ill-fitting components. This alteration suggests that their producer might be aware of these hardware flaws and tried to fix it. Yet, despite these changes, the newer models of the SSDs are still prone to failures, resulting in a steady stream of customers seeking data recovery services from companies like Attingo.

Nonetheless, Western Digital continues to insist that some of its SSDs failed because of firmware problems, which have been fixed. It is unclear why newer version of these drives reportedly continue to fail, however.

A new report from a data recovery company now points the finger at design and manufacturing flaws as the underlying issue with the recent flood of SanDisk Extreme Pro failures that eventually spurred a class action lawsuit. It became clear in May that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB SSDs suffered from sudden data loss; at this point, the company promised a firmware update to owners of the 4TB models. However, the 2TB and 3TB models also suffer from the same issue, and Western Digital did not promise any firmware updates for these drives.

Markus Häfele, Managing Director of Attingo, a data recovery company, told FutureZone that the problem lies in hardware, not firmware, which could explain the lack of corrective firmware updates for those models and SanDisk's continued silence about the source of the issues. 

A Hardware Problem

Attingo, which has been in the data recovery business for over 25 years, normally sees these failed SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs at least once a week. The problem appears to be rather complex. According to Häfele, the components used in these SSDs are too big for the circuit board, causing weak connections (i.e., high impendence and high temperatures) and making them prone to breaking. He also says that the soldering material used to attach these components is prone to forming bubbles and breaking easily.  

It remains unknown whether the cause is cheap solder, the componentry, or both contribute to the issues observed. However, newer revisions of these SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs seem to have been modified with extra epoxy resin to secure the oversized components. This suggests that Western Digital might know about the hardware problems. Nevertheless, these newer models are still failing, thus sending data recovery service customers to firms like Attingo.  

According to the head of Attingo, the issue seems to be affecting multiple product lineups, including both SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD as well as the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD.

A Strange Attitude?

Western Digital's handling of this situation, especially in communicating with customers and the media, can easily be criticized. Our colleagues from The Verge first reported back on August 8 that Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme 3TB SSDs can suddenly lose data, requiring expensive data recovery services to recoup precious files — if you're lucky. As it turns out, one of The Verge's editors lost a video stored on one of these drives and, after a quick investigation, discovered that he is far from alone with this problem. He noted that people continued losing data on 2TB SSDs after May, which is when Western Digital promised a firmware update for the 4TB drives.  

To follow up on its investigation, the Verge quizzed Western Digital about the recurring issue with its Extreme Pro SSDs but did not receive a response as of August 19, 2023. The website asked WD why storage that could potentially lose data was suddenly on sale at several retailers and whether the company planned to offer free data recovery services to its customers. The editors also questioned whether Western Digital proactively warned users about the possible issue.  

NAND memory-based drives can lose data due to multiple factors. Sometimes, the flash drive itself might have manufacturing defects that can cause data loss. This is more common with low-quality or counterfeit drives, but this is certainly not the case with the SanDisk Extreme Pro products bought from prominent retailers like Amazon. Worse yet, these external SSDs are aimed at professionals. 

While one of the issues is that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro suddenly lose data, another is that the company hasn't communicated well about the problems. We have contacted Western Digital once again for comment and await a response. 

A problem that I've personally encountered many times on my PC and especially on consoles, is the lack of room on the integrated storage. It's pretty easy to add an extra SSD to your PC to incorporate the ever-expanding size of computer games, and the same goes for the PlayStation 5 console, although Xbox is a little different. To upgrade the storage on your Xbox Series X or S console you have to invest in a proprietary system that was up until recently monopolized by only one choice. 

At its lowest-ever price on Amazon, you can pick up a 1TB WD Black C50 Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S for just $119. This expansion card normally goes for $149 and even in the recent Prime Day sales was only reduced to $129, but with this $30 coupon offer, you can now upgrade your storage for the best price this drive has ever been on offer for.

The C50 is compatible with both the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles through a proprietary port on the back of the consoles. There is no need to take the consoles apart to install the drive internally, and this makes it possible for the drive to be easily swapped between consoles if for example to want to transport your games and saves easily to a friend's console. The WD Black C50 comes in a rugged construction with a cap/cover to protect the drive during transport or if stored in a drawer etc. 

Another benefit of this storage solution is that you can have multiple of them to easily swap out your storage on the fly to be able to load up a large variety of games. This is especially useful if you have terrible internet or data caps stopping you from easily uninstalling your favorite games and re-installing them when you want to play a particular game.