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.
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