At its Flash Perspective event today, Western Digital unveiled the new SanDisk Professional brand of premium storage solutions for content creators and professionals. From producing the latest blockbuster film to capturing the moment at a destination wedding to managing business-critical content, the powerful SanDisk Professional portfolio is designed to deliver scalable, high-performance, reliable solutions across industries globally.

Professional content is in constant motion. Content that's captured or created needs to be saved, transferred, off-loaded, shared and archived. SanDisk Professional offers a range of purpose-built tools to harmonize every step of that process. "As a professional photographer and filmmaker, my livelihood depends on how I get the job done. There is no room for error. I need the most advanced, reliable and trusted equipment out in the field," said Lucas Gilman, adventure photographer and filmmaker. "For years I've relied on SanDisk and G-Technology solutions because they enable me to focus on the moment with confidence that my creativity won't be interrupted, and without concern about whether or not they can keep up with my technical needs."

You may remember Nimbus Data's Exadrive, which was announced back in 2018 to claim the crown of world's densest SSD solution with a full 100 TB capacity crammed into the usual 3.5" form-factor and SATA connection as most (now) budget drives. At the time, pricing was available via a direct quote only. now, the company has changed that paradigm and is yelling straight at customers' wallets.

Cutting expectations short, and yet somehow supplanting them, Nimbus Data's Exadrives can be yours for the low, low price of $40,000 for a 100 TB version (a clean-looking $400 per TB). the 50 TB version is slightly saner when it comes to pricing: it only goes up to the $250 per TB barrier, costing a mundane $12,500. Of course, this is enterprise-grade MLC NAND providing read/write speeds rated at 500 & 460 MB/s, respectively, and up to 114,000/105,000 IOps reads/writes. Quick, fun napkin math right here: this 3.5" 100 TB density would be equivalent to no less than 69,444,444 3.5" floppy disks. Stack those floppies one on top of the other and you'd get a 229 km-high tower for your troubles. Oh how times have changed.

Do you know what's better than a 10 TB HDD? A 100 TB HDD. Seagate has published a product roadmap showing the evolution of their HDDs in the next few years. According to that roadmap, we'll be able to buy a 100 TB hard drive in 2025. Other makers such as Western Digital talked about 40 TB drives in 2025 thanks to MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, but it seems Seagate is even more optimistic, and in fact they'll use HDMR (Heated Dot Magnetic Recording), an evolution of the HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology.

Seagate expects to have 20 TB HAMR-HDDs by 2020, and from that moment on they'll continue to work on this technology to launch 36 TB HDDs by 2022, 48 TB drives before 2024 and that 100 TB units in 2025. HAMR will enable double areal density growth each 2.5 years according to Seagate. The current PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology could disappear in that future, and it seems HDDs will continue to be a valuable asset for those who look for the cheapest price per GB.