During Western Digital's recent third-quarter earnings conference call, CEO David Goeckeler revealed that the growing need for greater capacity and faster access to data by customers around the world is pushing the company to expand its solid-state capabilities.
The company turned in a profitable quarter, with revenue soaring above expectations to $3.46 billion, a 29% year-over-year increase. The company managed to reverse a streak of losses and reported a profit of $135 million. These achievements contrast sharply with those of rival Seagate, which reported an 11% year-on-year decline in revenue to $1.66 billion.
Goeckeler stressed that Western Digital's improved financial performance was the result of the company's efforts to offer a more diversified product range. He also said that WD was committed to offering higher SSD capacities due to the growing demand for AI-related applications. He said customers “want them.” [SSDs] at much higher capacity points, 30 and 60 terabyte capacity points.”
HAMR HDD Technology
Reporting on third quarter results, Blocks and files wrote “WD is currently shipping DC SN640 TLC PCIe gen 3 SSDs with up to 30.72 TB of capacity and PCIe gen 4 SN650 and 655 drives with 15.36 TB. “We now expect WD to announce 60TB SSDs later this year.”
Without going into detail about the exact capacities being worked on, Goeckeler said the company was expanding the size of the drives in line with what customers were demanding, stating that WD is “increasing capacity and going through a qualification at regard”. So, we are in that process with clients.”
He also talked about hard disk recording (HAMR) technology, including the issues surrounding it, stating: “We have been working on HAMR for quite some time. We understand HAMR very well. We understand all the issues with HAMR and what it takes to qualify it. “Clearly, we are doing it all behind the scenes, because we have a product portfolio with the best TCO that we can offer in the market today, and we can do it up to 40 terabytes.” Western Digital rival Seagate recently announced the results of an experimental test that showed that one of its hard drives using HAMR could operate continuously for more than 6,000 hours.
