Toshiba is pushing microwave-assisted magnetic recording, or MAMR, a technology that will play in its 20 TB drive this year and bring it to at least 26 TB.

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services reached almost $53 billion in the first quarter, a 34 percent year-over-year increase and the 11 th time in 12 quarters that the growth rate was between 34 percent and 40 percent, according to Synergy Research Group. While hard drives are declining as a storage medium in client devices, the real action is taking place in datacenters, driven by the increasingly massive amounts of data being created and the accelerating growth of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Tencent as well as other cloud players. What they see is only a small part of the picture, he says. But when people think storage device, personal data, digital data, video, they see what they see.” Maybe there’s one backing up something in your closet. But the hard drive really isn’t showing up in your thin MacBooks or your Windows devices or Chromebooks or, say, set-top boxes. “We all consume technology somehow and we’re highly biased towards devices. “I get that probably three years ago it was pretty a legitimate question for people to ask relative to how we consume technology,” Gorakhpurwalla, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s HDD business unit, tells The Next Platform. They tend to boil down to the same query: “Why are you talking about hard drives? I thought hard drives were dead.” After almost two years with data storage giant Western Digital, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla is getting used to the questions.

Hdd mark