At hyperscale, enterprise HDD reliability matters far more than it is often given credit for, even in architectures built with multiple layers of well-engineered and long-established failsafe measures in place.

And while no cloud architecture can fully eliminate the risk of access outages—whether from malicious denial-of-service and ransomware attacks, network-resetting system updates, or simple mistakes during periodic system maintenance—cloud providers typically commit up to five “nines” of availability in their SLAs. This widely accepted benchmark reflects their confidence in distributed systems that guarantee 99.999% uptime, or near-constant access to cloud computing customers.

Achieving 11 nines of data durability  

Leading cloud providers are confident enough in their data preservation strategies around data resilience that they offer an industry-standard, SLA-backed 11 nines of data durability.¹ To achieve this, most providers deploy overlapping strategies—erasure coding, which distributes data and parity information across multiple drives, node-level distribution, automated data tiering, and geographic redundancy—to reduce the risk of customer data loss.

By some estimates, traditional 3.5” hard drives handle as much as 80% of customer data, given their optimal balance of high capacity, performance, and total cost of ownership (TCO) when it comes to addressing most enterprise workloads.² For this reason, cloud storage SLAs are calculated based on industry-standard approaches to addressing expected points of failure and on cloud providers’ confidence in the reliability of their enterprise-grade spinning hard drives. 

A strategy for data resilience 

Cloud providers achieve data resilience in part by shifting customer data between their proprietary architectures which manage these hot, warm, and cold data tiers, and by factoring in their drives’ current operating health, their known reliability, and the systems they have in place to trigger failover as needed to minimize disruption.

For example, by distributing the data plane across many individual drives via erasure coding, which uses parity data as part of ensuring redundancy, cloud providers can dial up their fault tolerance for storage device failures.³ And by distributing their control planes across multiple servers or nodes, these same cloud providers can guard against what might be single points of failure or server compute failures.

In addition, they add replication to provide geographic redundancy, ensuring access to and protection of the data in case of site-wide disruptions such as network outages, power failures, or natural disasters.⁴

Indeed, hyperscalers historically adjust their storage resilience by adding nodes or failover safeguards to accommodate individual drive failures or inconsistencies. However, with millions of drives deployed at various stages of their lifecycle within a hyperscaler’s fleet, overall drive reliability is vital, since it directly impacts operational costs and performance stability.

Of course, even when a well-established cloud computing architecture prevents data loss, drive failures can be disruptive, consuming resources and bandwidth during data rebuilds that by their nature introduce latency. This is why hard drive design and ongoing storage innovation cycles that allow systems to isolate individual drive platters or read-write heads, thereby minimizing failures and increasing drive reliability, are essential. 

Why HDDs are indispensable infrastructure in an AI-first era

Once treated as interchangeable commodities, high-capacity HDDs are now widely and rightly recognized as a core infrastructure pillar of the current AI build-out, on par with CPUs, GPUs, and high-speed memory arrayed in dense server racks. Indeed, Western Digital HDDs deliver the bedrock persistence, resilience, and platform reliability at massive scale that cloud providers rely on to provide AI system functionality.

These HDDs are also at the heart of the massive capacity data lakes and the “immutable data storage” and “rollback” capabilities against ransomware attacks that hyperscalers and many server hardware OEMs now offer. Western Digital’s 2026 roadmap reflects a continuation of a proven, manufacturing-led approach to capacity expansion—prioritizing reliability, qualification simplicity, and predictable performance at scale.

This is not simply a matter of keeping up with demand, this is crucial to the future of AI: data center construction is expected to continue its tremendous growth well into 2027 as it expands AI capabilities and stores the training and inference workloads underpinning complex AI models.⁵ The magnitude of this shift becomes clearer when you look at the scale of data center investment now underway:

• According to Business Insider, there were 1,240 data centers operating or planned in the U.S. in 2024.⁶
• Synergy Research Group reported that 2024 saw 137 new hyperscale data centers come online and that there could be an additional 130–140 hyperscale data centers completed annually in the short term, a construction tempo that market intelligence firm attributes to investments in generative AI technology.⁷
• Goldman Sachs estimates that the leading hyperscalers could spend between $350 billion and $470 billion on data center infrastructure investments to support AI capabilities in 2026.⁸
• Meta’s planned $10 billion single “Hyperion” data center in Louisiana is projected to be larger than New York’s Central Park with its four buildings set across four million square feet.⁹

It is likely that every one of these new data centers will have a significant storage footprint, with new high-capacity HDDs composing a substantial portion of the infrastructure required to make their AI systems durable, scalable, and economically viable.   

A roadmap built on proven innovation 

Western Digital’s track record of innovation continues a tradition of delivering high-capacity, market-ready drives that are available at scale. The combination of HelioSeal®, OptiNAND™, and UltraSMR technologies has allowed Western Digital drives to reach capacities of up to 32TB¹⁰ today. This current generation of high-capacity HDDs uses proven recording technology and firmware, leveraging ongoing manufacturing process improvements that expand capacity at scale while crucially maintaining stable, predictable performance.

Western Digital’s roadmap is designed to build on previous achievements to simplify drive qualifications and protect hyperscalers’ investments in storage servers and data redundancy. Our history of delivering capacity increases, product improvements, and useful firmware on schedule and at established cadences allows cloud providers and other enterprises to reduce operational complexity and accelerate new drive technology adoption, either by node or in a fleet update cycle.   

Two pillars of data resilience: architecture and drive quality 

There are two fundamentals to data resilience in enterprise cloud architectures: 

1. System-level design that distributes risk, and 
2. Component-level reliability that reduces how often those protections must be exercised. 

These elements work in concert. Western Digital’s build quality, firmware stability, and longevity-boosting innovations give hyperscalers the confidence to architect with appropriate redundancy—and provide services with fewer disruptions, lower latency, and improved operational efficiency.

Modern data centers depend on high-capacity HDDs to claim with 99.999999999% confidence that hosted customer files will remain intact and uncorrupted and that these data centers are equipped to store everything from simple databases to trillion-parameter-based AI architectures.¹¹

These drives store the file, object, and block storage that enterprises rely on for critical workloads as well as the training data required to facilitate machine learning, AI inference, and generative AI content creation. The assurance that enterprise data is stored safely in multiple zones is the core promise of established global cloud services built on billions of dollars of globe-spanning infrastructure.

Confidence by design

Western Digital’s hard drive innovations, build quality, and engineered durability reduce drive failures on the front end and minimize seek latency caused by vibration

This is the role of indispensable infrastructure: the proven, durable, and scalable HDD platforms that quietly but critically keep the cycle of AI queries, prompts, and generated elements running. In the AI present and future, hard drive reliability isn’t merely a data sheet metric—it is a foundational pillar of Western Digital’s design and manufacturing philosophy that underpins the trust storage and AI capability providers have in the infrastructure they build to enable scale.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/; https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/availability-durability; https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy 
2. Source: IDC, Worldwide IDC Hard Disk Drive Forecast, 2025–2029, doc #US53465525, June 2025 and IDC, Worldwide IDC Solid State Drive Forecast Update, 2025-2029, doc #US52455725, June 2025 
3. GeeksForGeeks.org, “Erasure Coding vs. Replication for Fault Tolerant Systems,” July 23, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/2s3eannp   
4. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy; https://docs.cloud.google.com/storage/docs/availability-durability   
5. The Wall Street Journal, “Oracle, OpenAI Sign $300 Billion Cloud Deal” by Berber Jin, September 10, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/mr32spzt  
6. Business Insider, “The AI Bubble You Haven’t Heard About” by Dakin Campbell, November 18, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/34dfckxk  
7. Synergy Research Group, “Hyperscale Data Center Count Hits 1,136,” March 19, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/5xdhwrxb  
8. Goldman Sachs Insights, “The AI Bubble You Haven’t Heard About” by Dakin Campbell, November 18, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/34dfckxk  
9. Data Center Dynamics, “Meta Plans $60-$65 Billion CapEx on AI Data Center Boom,” by Sebastian Moss, January 24, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/45zxh3w6 
10. One terabyte (TB) is equal to one trillion bytes. Actual user capacity may be less due to operating environment. 
11. Silicon Angle, “Moonshot Launches Open-Source ‘Kimi K2 Thinking’ AI With One Trillion Parameters and Reasoning Capabilities” by Kyt Dotson, November 7, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/4zwdb599