Western Digital on Wednesday announced a technology breakthrough in HDD technology that will fuel the next decade HDD progress, according to Brendan Collins, Western Digital's VP of Devices. In San Jose, California, the company demonstrated microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), a technology that should enable hard drives with 40TB of capacity and beyond that by 2025. But WD will start making MAMR drives as early as 2019.

MAMR offers "all the gain without the pain" of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), Collins said, bypassing HAMR's problems with cost and reliability.

Western Digital expects MAMR to help HDDs remain a long-term complement to SSDs in the enterprise segment, and it expects capacity enterprise HDD technology to be a growth business through 2030 and beyond.