Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Covering Digital Storage Technology & Market. IEEE President in 2024 Follow Author Aug 09, 2026, 11:44pm EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Summary The IEEE TMRC meeting, highlighted significant advancements in HDD technology, showing an 8 TB/disk storage density using HAMR. This progress supports projections from Seagate and Western Digital for 100TB HDDs by 2030, which will require 10TB/disk or more platters. Seagate recently tripled its head production facilities in Minneapolis, not for increased unit volume, but to manage the growing complexity of product transitions. The HDD market saw robust performance in C2Q 2026, with total exabytes shipped rising 5.6% to 504.3EB. Estimated revenues reached $8.5 billion, a 14.9% quarterly increase. With over $15 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, the industry is poised to exceed $30 billion for the year, a level not seen since 2014, driven by AI workload demand.
Hard disk drives getty This last week I attended part of the IEEE TMRC meeting in San Diego as well as the 2026 Future of Memory and Storage Conference in Santa, Clara, CA . I also sent to subscribers the latest HDD industry updates from the August 2026 Digital Storage Technology Newsletter . Let’s look at some announcements on HDD technical developments from the TMRC conference as well as our latest newsletter. I will get into the 2026 FMS developments in future articles.
At the TMRC meeting there was a paper by Steve Granz, et. al on recent advances in HDD laboratory areal density demonstrations. The figure below, from that paper shows that the company demonstrated an 8 TB/disk storage density, or 4.5TBpsi using HAMR. This is up from a 6.9TB/disk laboratory demonstration reported in 2025.
Seagate 8 TB capacity disk laboratory demonstration Seagate Technology and IEEE Note that Seagate and Western Digital are projecting 100TB HDDs available by 2030. If Seagate was going to do this with 10 disks, like their current 36TB product, this would require 10TB/disk areal densities. Western Digital is talking about doing this with 12-14 disks in a drive.
The figure below, from our most recent newsletter show this advance in demonstrated and shipping digital storage areal density and the history of areal density improvements over the years, including the latest demonstration.
HDD laboratory and shipping HDD areal densities Coughlin Associates, Inc. There were reports that Seagate expanded their head production facilities by 3X in Minneapolis in June, 2026 . At the same time both Seagate and Western Digital have said that they are focusing on shipping higher storage capacity HDDs versus shipping substantially larger number of HDD units. During the recent Seagate earning call, Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate, gave some insights on why they would expand their head production facility without planning a large increase in unit HDD production.
Mosely said, “So the thing that’s actually driving factory complexity is not just drive numbers or heads numbers or media numbers. It's actually the product transitions. These new products, say 4 terabytes going to 5 terabytes, there will be more time in the tools, more time through the tools. Sometimes it has to touch the tool multiple times. The factory complexity is what's driving a lot of the investment that you made for refe…