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.

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.

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 reference at the time.”

Below are some of the findings from our latest newsletter on the HDD industry.

Total exabytes shipped in C2Q 2026 were up 5.6% compared with C1Q 2026 (504.3EB versus 477.5EB). The pie chart below, shows total exabyte shipments percentages for 2026 to date from Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba.

HDD revenues (estimated at about $8.5B in C2Q 2026) were up about 14.9% from the prior quarter. The pie chart below, shows estimated industry revenue percentages for 2026 to date from Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. Total HDD revenues in the first two quarters of 2026 were over $15B and look on track to exceed $30B in 2026. We haven’t seen this level of HDD industry revenue since about 2014.

2026 TMRC presentations show 8TB per disk HDDs in the laboratory, supporting higher capacity HDDs in coming years. Due to the demand of AI workloads and the imbalance of HDD supply and demand, HDD revenues could exceed $35$ in 2026.