WD's 40TB UltraSMR Drives Start Shipping: Betting on 8x Bandwidth Over Raw Capacity
rbanffy · hn · 2026-08-08
Western Digital (WD) announced that its 40TB UltraSMR hard drives have started shipping. To meet the data storage demands of the AI era, WD is betting that 8x higher bandwidth is more critical than simply adding more terabytes of raw capacity. This highlights that in large-scale AI model training and inference, storage read bandwidth is becoming a more crucial bottleneck than pure storage size.
More from Infra
- Zero's next-gen IVM engine runs in a single DO, live-querying a 100GiB R2 database — threepointone · 2026-10-16
- Meme: driving to the chip factory in 2028 captures AI's compute anxiety — beffjezos · 2026-10-16
- One volunteer maintains the time zone file behind 4 billion phones — danbri · 2026-10-16
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on 4x DGX Spark: weights alone are 511GB, the 494 tok/s claim doesn't fit — Aroochacha · 2026-10-16
- Open-sourced Intel GPU Vulkan inference upgrades: 2x ingestion, 60%+ faster inference — Fun-Aardvark-1143 · 2026-10-16
- ELSFP pain points: >3dB insertion loss, costly PMF, harsh packaging requirements — jwt0625 · 2026-10-16