Western Digital said at a media briefing in Johannesburg that it plans to release a 20TB mechanical hard drive.

The world’s most-used storage brand already offers a 16TB HDD, but the company plans to increase the storage capacity of the cheaper HDD technology.

Brad Bennett, senior channel marketing manager for the Middle East and Africa, said he is uncertain when the 20TB HDD will be released.

“We can’t tell you when it will be available because even we don’t know yet,” said Bennett.

HDD technology is still relevant

The increased popularity of SSDs has provide tech users with a high-performance alternative to the older HDD technology.

However, this does not mean that the hard disk drive is anywhere close to obsolete, Bennett said.

“Our R&D team is always looking at what’s next and how it can be applied to the market,” said Bennett.

“We wouldn’t be looking at bringing out higher capacity drives if we thought it would become redundant. There’s still a need.”

Western Digital’s HDD range

Western Digital offers four ranges of hard drive disks:

The Blue range is the cheapest of the Western Digital HDD products, and is used by regular home users.

Western Digital’s Black range offers higher performance for power-users such as gamers.

Red signifies Western Digital’s Network Attached Storage (NAS) range of HDDs.

Finally, the Purple HDD lineup is targeted at those who need storage for their surveillance systems.

All of Western Digital’s hard disk drives come in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch versions except for the Purple range, which is only available in a 3.5-inch form factor.

Western Digital has not disclosed under which of these ranges its upcoming 20TB HDD will fall.