Western Digital showcased its refreshed G-DRIVE professional external storage lineup at Computex 2026 following its relaunch back in February as a unified brand. The lineup spans portable to rackmount-style storage solutions. At the top of the lineup sits the G-DRIVE 8 supporting up to 224 TB of capacity and featuring eight-bay hardware RAID. The WD G-DRIVE 4 is a four-bay model offering up to 80 TB of storage. Both models feature hardware RAID and Thunderbolt 5, daisy-chaining for up to six devices and an e-ink display. Western Digital plans for a release in early 2027.

The G-DRIVE 2 has a dual-bay configuration with storage capacity up to 56 TB. It also kept the Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, six-device daisy-chaining and the integrated e-ink display. It is expected in early 2027.

Having offloaded its entire consumer flash storage business to Sandisk brand, Western Digital is focusing on the Ultrastar brand of enterprise hard drives, and the G-Drive brand of professional storage solutions. During the exhibition in Taipei, the company highlighted how continuous AI workloads ,ranging from initial training models to active agentic systems, generate massive, compounding volumes of data. WD asserts that managing this exponential data growth while maintaining economic efficiency is the defining challenge for enterprise and cloud computing environments. By treating AI primarily as a data system rather than merely a compute system, the company aims to provide the foundational storage necessary for long-term operational viability.

Central to Western Digital's showcase are several significant advancements in traditional mechanical storage. The company demonstrated its comprehensive Ultrastar hard drive portfolio, which utilizes recording technologies such as UltraSMR, ePMR, and HAMR to achieve massive capacities. To integrate these advanced drives into functional enterprise environments, the company expanded its platform solutions with the introduction of the Ultrastar Data 3000 series JBODs. These scalable enclosures feature twelve ports of 24 Gb/s SAS-4 host connectivity to accommodate increasing bandwidth demands. The 3000 series implements specialized physical engineering, including ArcticFlow multizone cooling and IsoVibe vibration isolation technologies. Western Digital states that these environmental controls can reduce drive return rates by up to sixty-two percent, ensuring dependable operation in high-density deployments.