**[Western Digital Chief Product Officer: AI Storage Shouldn't Rely Solely on Flash, HDD Remains the Foundation for Long-Term Large-Scale Data Preservation]** BlockBeats News, August 6 — Western Digital Chief Product Officer Ahmed Shihab stated in an article that the key to AI storage competition is not simply pursuing the fastest medium but rather the ability to continuously scale capacity at an affordable cost. He believes that while many architectures function well in the early stages, issues may arise when data scales from several petabytes (PB) to hundreds of PB or even exabytes (EB) due to uncontrollable costs. Flash storage is suitable for high-performance, low-latency scenarios such as model weights, GPU spillover, KV cache, and session contexts. On the other hand, HDDs are better suited for large-scale, long-term, and cost-sensitive data such as training corpora, logs, checkpoints, compliance records, synthetic data, and inference outputs. He summarized: "Flash handles the present, HDD handles the entire lifecycle." At AI scale, storage costs themselves can become an architectural issue. Storing large volumes of data on high-performance media over the long term will consume budgets for computing, networking, power, and personnel. For many bulk storage workloads, the issue is not whether flash can store the data but whether customers can afford to use flash exclusively over the long term. In the future, AI storage will not be dominated by a single technology but should adopt a tiered design based on performance, cost, power consumption, density, reliability, and data lifecycle. He emphasized that this is not a competition between flash and HDD but rather the need to match the right medium to different workloads from the outset; otherwise, scaling up the architecture may impact business sustainability. [Original Article Link]