Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
In 2026, exascale storage architectures will curb their dependence on HDDs and rely more on flash and tape.
By Ted Oade, Director of Product Marketing, Spectra Logic
In the late 1980s, Dan Stanzione – now Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) – purchased his first hard disk drive (HDD). Fast forward to 2025, and he’ll tell you he has possibly just bought his last.
For decades, HDDs steadily expanded their role in storage infrastructure because they are easy-to-use, relatively reliable, and widely compatible.
But this narrative is beginning to change, particularly at the cutting edge of IT infrastructure.
In 2026, a growing number of IT leaders are reducing their reliance on HDDs for backup and archive. Below, I’ll explore three reasons why storage solutions built primarily on flash and tape are poised to gain momentum.
Macroeconomic Forces
According to a U.N. report, there are more than 11,800 data centers worldwide, with over 5,000 located in the United States alone. To fuel the AI boom, thousands of additional data centers have either been announced or are already under construction.
Hyperscale data centers have relied on HDDs for the majority of their storage capacity to the point that enterprise-grade HDDs are now in short supply. HDD suppliers are reluctant to add costly and inflexible manufacturing capacity driving sharp price increases and multi-year wait times.
That’s a major challenge for data center managers who need to store massive volumes of data right now.
As a result, some organizations, ranging from research institutions to universities to enterprises, are revisiting a time-tested storage medium that offers enormous scalability at the lowest total cost of ownership: tape. When paired with flash and intelligent tiering, tape delivers a secure, dense, and flexible cold storage infrastructure that has been proven to last for decades.
Rather than competing with deep-pocketed hyperscalers for limited HDD supply, we are seeing IT leaders transition HDDs to a supporting role in an innovative infrastructure based primarily on flash for performance and tape for capacity.
Flash & Tape Elevates Performance
When the Texas Advanced Computing Center needed a new archive for its open-science AI supercomputer, Horizon, Stanzione and his storage team determined that a tape-based system was the most practical and financially viable choice. In late 2025, TACC commissioned Ranch, an exascale archive built primarily on flash and tape.
The system consists of two Spectra TFinity tape libraries and Versity ScoutAM software. Disk plays only a minor role, storing just a few petabytes in an extended cache.
“I hope this is the year I bought my last hard drive,” Stanzione said during a webinar, citing the superior performance and user experience of SSDs. “Flash is much better for the small files and random-access patterns that we really have – and not the big files and structured-access patterns that we’d like to think we have.”
The move to a flash-and-tape infrastructure also addresses one of disk’s most alarming weaknesses: “captive data”. As HDD device-level capacities have increased, performance has remained the same, causing greater amounts of data to be trapped behind a relatively small throughput bottleneck. This sets up a number of problems including slower file retrieval times and extended recovery times when a failed drive needs to be replaced. Even worse, lengthy rebuild times degrade performance even further while increasing the chances of data loss. Reducing HDD dependence enables a more performant, streamlined system capable of managing exascale workloads with greater efficiency and resiliency.
A Proven Tape Roadmap
In 2025, the storage industry saw the introduction of LTO-10, next-generation tape media with a native capacity of 30 terabytes. Just months later, the LTO consortium announced a 40 terabyte version of LTO-10. That 33% density increase underscores tape’s continued technological progress, allowing IT teams to scale faster, reduce media handling, and improve operational efficiency.
Compare this trajectory with the decelerating density growth of HDDs. While HDD capacity once doubled every few years, recent gains have been incremental. HDD innovation appears to be slowing. Areal density, the number of bits that can be stored on a single platter, is also approaching physical limits. Packing exponentially more data into spinning disks is becoming increasingly difficult.
Tape, by contrast, maintains a strong roadmap with the promise of dramatic density improvements. That’s why some of the world’s most respected scientific institutions continue to trust tape for secure, high-capacity storage today and tomorrow. “From a technical perspective, tape technology has a solid roadmap, and I believe it can eventually be capable of storing over 400 terabytes of data on a single cartridge,” said Vladim�r Bahyl, Senior Tape Technology Data Storage Specialist at CERN, which now stores an exabyte of experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider on tape.
Right-Sizing HDDs
To suggest that 2026 will mark the death of HDDs would be hyperbolic. For the foreseeable future, HDDs will remain an essential part of the storage landscape. But as more archivists recognize the economic, performance, and capacity advantages of flash and tape solutions, organizations will begin to right-size their dependence on disk.
Supply-and-demand pressures aren’t likely to ease for several years. In the meantime, IT leaders will increasingly turn to archives that offer superior scalability, resilience, and performance – without waiting in line for pricey hard drives.
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