[tomek@vz]

Western Digital is bringing fresh momentum to an aging storage category with two ambitious technologies aimed at redefining mechanical hard drive performance limits. The company's new High Bandwidth Drive architecture and Dual Pivot actuator system aim to narrow the gap between traditional spinning disks and QLC-based solid-state drives – a gap that has long put HDDs on the defensive in high-performance environments such as AI workloads and hyperscale data centers.
The new High Bandwidth Drive concept represents a shift in how data moves between platters and the interface. Instead of the standard one-head-per-surface design that reads or writes sequentially, the new approach allows multiple read/write heads to operate in parallel across several tracks.

> New high-bandwidth and dual-actuator drives target data center workloads with QLC-level throughput