Mehdi Hosseini: Right.
Gianluca Romano: But we also said we expect every quarter to be positive.
Mehdi Hosseini: Negative, just sequentially, down in September and then rebounding in December on a sequential basis?
Gianluca Romano: Yes. Better, yes, better point. On the OpEx maybe, I want to – I just clarify, we don’t have variable compensation right now in our numbers. So we could have a little bit of increase in the future if the business comes back stronger, just a little bit, not much.
Mehdi Hosseini: Got it. Thank you guys.
Operator: The next question comes from Mark Miller with The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.
Mark Miller: I’m just wondering if, it sounds like the PMR is going further than I originally thought it would be. Is this a change? Or was that always in your plan?
Dave Mosley: It was always in the plan. Yes. I think, Mark, we’ve kind of been focused on 16, 20, 24 and bringing on the technology that way. We believe we have great heads of media on PMR. It’s getting towards the top end of the curve, right? So it’s harder and harder to squeeze things up. And we’ve worked really hard to make sure that the drive that was taking us there would also take us to HAMR. So we’re leveraging as much as we possibly can and then only changing the aerial density critical components that get us the area of that to get us into the 30s and building much more confidence on that new S-curve actually as time goes on. So I’m convinced there’s going to be 40 terabyte drives in the world, not too distant future. And we’ve talked about the capabilities of these things in the lab. We’re ready to go 5 terabytes per disk. So teams incrementally more positive every time. So that’s good. The teams are making progress.
Mark Miller: Is there any specific technology advance that’s allowing you to push that now up to almost 30 terabytes?
Dave Mosley: Sorry, you mean beyond HAMR?
Mark Miller: No, I mean taking the PMR up to the high-20s in terms of terabytes, anything new in the technology and any breakthroughs or advancements?
Dave Mosley: Well, we’re always working new readers designs that are applicable to go to 30 terabyte and 40 terabyte drives as well. It’s not only about the write [ph] technology, if you will. There’s – because PMR is implying the write technology. That’s right with the write, you know that. So it’s not a HAMR just versus PMR. There’s other technology things that are being worked. Technology vectors are being worked. But mid-20s is CMR, high 20s has been SMR, and there’s many different kinds of SMR variants for different customers. So I think you have to be a little bit careful with picking individual capacity points. And by the way, HAMR can use SMR as well on top of it. So when we get into the 30s, there might be that same kind of spread of capacity points because of how people are choosing to deploy HAMR in their data centers.
Mark Miller: Thank you.
Operator: The last question today comes from Vijay Rakesh with Mizuho. Please go ahead.
Vijay Rakesh: Yes. Hi, just a quick two questions. Just when you look at HAMR, obviously ramping well, any way of looking at what the exabyte mix would be as you look at calendar 2024 or even calendar 2025?
Dave Mosley: Yes. I do think that as we – and this is a delicate balance between the capacity we’ll still have to make drives, the lead times associated with those big drives and the economic returns that we’re going to be getting, so how many do we start now, how many parts do we start now to be able to answer that. But theoretically, with HAMR allowing us to jump quite a bit in exabytes per box, if the demand is strong enough, then the exabyte growth will be strong, very strong. So a lot of this first order driver is still demand, we’re going to answer that call with the components that we have. We’re very much leaning into the product transition on HAMR because we have that much confidence. I think the customer’s qualification is going well and the customer interest is high because they see such a market TCO proposition as well.
