5 reasons HDDs will continue to dominate enterprise storage in the AI era

By Owais Mohammed, Director of Sales – MEA & India, Western Digital

Enterprises today are grappling with an unprecedented surge in data creation. Every interaction from video and images to logs, sensor outputs, and (AI-)generated content is contributing to an exponential rise in what businesses must store and analyse. As this explosion accelerates, so does the amount of new, inherently unstructured data that dominates enterprise environments. Unlike traditional structured data, unstructured data is expanding explosively, reshaping how organisations architect storage, and plan long-term data strategies. 

This is not a marginal shift but a structural one forcing enterprises to rethink how they store, protect and extract value from information at scale. The need for scalable, cost-efficient, high-capacity storage has never been greater, positioning HDDs as a critical foundation of the world’s data economy. Thanks to its unmatched ability to store massive datasets efficiently, HDDs are existential for AI and data-intensive workloads. As AI pipelines expand and data retention needs intensify, capacity-led infrastructure powered by high-capacity HDDs remains essential for storing, preserving, and scaling the datasets that fuel today’s AI era. 

Listed below are the top five reasons why HDDs are flourishing: 

Cost-efficiency at scale 

As enterprises move deeper into the AI age, storage demands have ballooned, pushing many into the petabyte and increasingly exabyte range. At this scale, the economics of storage can become as important as capacity itself. This is why high-capacity HDDs remain indispensable: they deliver unmatched efficiencies, scalability, and sustainability at scale for the massive, largely non-latency-sensitive datasets that AI generates. This is the reason why hyperscale’s continue to rely on field-proven HDDs to power their workloads. 

High-capacity innovation

Another reason is the innovation power of HDD manufacturers. Companies like Western Digital have been pushing technology boundaries for more than 50 years, continuously re-inventing storage solutions to deliver the capacity customers demand. And they are continuing this journey. Next-generation, field-proven HDDs are already surpassing 30TB, enabled by advancements like energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and helium sealing. As global data creation accelerates toward the 527.5 Zettabytes (ZB) milestone, this density revolution becomes critical. Higher-capacity HDDs allow enterprises to scale within the same physical footprint, unlocking better rack-level efficiency, and enabling AI teams to maintain ever-growing training sets, image repositories, and long-term archives, without needing to rearchitect entire data centres. 

Power efficiency measured per terabyte 

HDDs are also thriving because of their strong power efficiency per terabyte, especially for bulk, sequential workloads that define AI data lakes and long-retention repositories. As per the IDC Worldwide Global StorageSphere Structured and Unstructured Data Forecast, 2025–2029, approximately 77% of the data stored globally across all storage media combined was unstructured data. This matters even more as data-centre growth faces energy and cooling challenges, with markets like India now hitting water-scarcity roadblocks in expansion. At scale, HDDs offer compelling energy-per-TB economics that remain hard to match.

Purpose-built for large, sequential workloads 

The modern enterprise runs on unstructured data. These datasets grow continuously, behave sequentially, and demand massive, cost-efficient capacity. This is precisely where HDDs excel. Their ability to sustain high-throughput sequential workloads at scale makes them the backbone of object storage, media workflows, surveillance systems, and AI training repositories. For these capacity-led, long-retention workloads, HDDs remain the most practical and performance-aligned storage foundation. 

Predictable TCO and lifecycle stability 

For enterprises balancing multi-year retention, compliance, and large-scale archival demands, predictability matters. HDDs come with mature refresh cycles, stable roadmaps, and consistent long-term economics, reducing uncertainty, and optimising the total cost of ownership.  The global HDD market size is predicted to reach US$ 63.7 Bn in 2032 from US$ 41.7 Bn in 2025 and the global nearline HDD market is expected to grow more than 23% between 2024 and 2028.

Summing up 

As AI reshapes the global data landscape, HDDs power the world’s most demanding storage environments. Their blend of high density, unmatched efficiency, energy advantages per terabyte, and predictable lifecycle economics ensures that HDDs remain central to enterprise storage strategies.