Hard Disk Drive | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Mon, 21 Sep 2015 18:41:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png Hard Disk Drive | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 Western Digital to abandon ‘Green’ brand in favour of ‘Blue’ HDDs https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/western-digital-to-abandon-green-brand-in-favour-of-blue-hdds/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/western-digital-to-abandon-green-brand-in-favour-of-blue-hdds/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2015 18:38:30 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=268577 Western Digital Corp. plans to unify its Green and Blue product lineups. The move will help the company to increase its profit margins. For end-users, the unification of low-cost HDD brands could mean increased performance of affordable hard disk drives. Western Digital is set to unify its Green and Blue families of hard disk drives …

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Western Digital Corp. plans to unify its Green and Blue product lineups. The move will help the company to increase its profit margins. For end-users, the unification of low-cost HDD brands could mean increased performance of affordable hard disk drives.

Western Digital is set to unify its Green and Blue families of hard disk drives under the “Blue” brand, reports PC Watch. WD Blue HDDs will be aimed at mainstream personal computers, WD Black will be designed for high-end desktops and workstations, whereas WD Red will focus on network attached storage systems.

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WD’s Green hard disk drives have variable RPM [revolutions per minute] performance, whereas WD Blue feature 5400 or 7400 RPM. It is unclear whether new HDDs will all feature variable RPM, or will stick to 5400 RPM, leaving 7200 PRM to the WD Black series.

For a limited period of time current WD Green HDDs will be sold under WD Blue brand, but with different product numbers.

wd_raid_edition_hdd_inside

WD reportedly claims that the unification is made to simplify HDD choice by consumers.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: In fact, cancellation of a low-cost hard drives brand makes sense for Western Digital from business standpoint. Increasing price of HDDs by $5 – $10 – a sum that many retail customers will never notice – will help the company to increase its revenues and margins. Any increase in revenue automatically means increase in research and development spending, which means additional performance and capacity.

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Sales of HDDs will drop in 2016, makers may have to cut HDD prices – Analyst https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/sales-of-hdds-will-decline-in-2016-producers-will-have-to-cut-hdd-prices-analyst/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/sales-of-hdds-will-decline-in-2016-producers-will-have-to-cut-hdd-prices-analyst/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2015 21:04:08 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=267378 Sales of hard disk drives have been on the decline this year because of slow demand for personal computers and tough competition from solid-state drives. While Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp. hope that demand of HDDs will pick up in the coming quarters, a market analyst claims that it will decline again. Moreover, in …

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Sales of hard disk drives have been on the decline this year because of slow demand for personal computers and tough competition from solid-state drives. While Seagate Technology and Western Digital Corp. hope that demand of HDDs will pick up in the coming quarters, a market analyst claims that it will decline again. Moreover, in the long-term, HDD makers will have to lower the price of their products because of competition.

Total available market of hard disk drives dropped to 125 million units in Q1 2015 and to 111 million units in Q2 2015, according to estimates by Seagate and Western Digital. By contrast, despite of dropping demand for PCs, sales of SSDs for client PCs in Q1 2015 grew by 3.5 per cent quarter-over-quarter, according to TrendFocus. Sales of all SSDs in the second quarter of 2015 increased by 2.9 per cent QoQ and totaled 23.859 million units.

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According to John Roy, an analyst with UBS, the situation in the market of HDDs will not change in 2016 and shipments of hard drives will decline even more significantly than this year.

“We believe HDD units are likely to decline over 10 per cent in the next twelve months after falling over 6 per cent the last twelve,” the analyst wrote in a note to clients, reports TechTraderDaily. “Demand for data storage is growing but demand for PCs is waning – UBS is modelling PC units to decline 8 per cent in calendar 2015 and 2 per cent in calendar 2016.”

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Despite of dropping demand for hard disk drives, UBS does not expect prices of such storage devices to decline any time soon because there are two big players – Seagate and Western Digital – and a considerably smaller one – Toshiba Corp. – which cannot ship more than around 22 million HDDs per quarter and thus grab a significant chunk of market share away from the big two.

“The duopoly with WDC is likely to support pricing and gross margins for now, in our view, but unit demand looks weak and competition from flash is getting tougher,” wrote Mr. Roy.

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Nonetheless, the emergence of storage-class memory, namely 3D XPoint from Intel Corp. and Micron, will affect pricing of solid-state drives based on NAND flash memory over time. Thanks to the fact that 3D XPoint is faster and more durable than NAND, customers will likely pay premium for SSDs on its base starting in 2016. Therefore, mainstream SSDs will get cheaper, which will force Seagate and Western Digital to reconsider pricing of enterprise-class, nearline and maybe even certain consumer HDDs.

“We believe HDD pricing will likely have to respond to flash and [storage class memory like 3D XPoint] with price cuts in the out years,” said the analyst.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Seagate and Western Digital know how to create advanced storage devices for all types of applications. If they had offered competitive SSDs for all market segments, solid-state drives would have helped them to offset declines of HDDs. Unfortunately, it does not look like Seagate and WD plan to roll-out a broad lineup of NAND flash-based drives in the coming months, which means that their business may decline again in 2016.

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Seagate: HAMR technology is not ready, still has reliability issues https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-hamr-technology-is-not-ready-for-prime-time-still-has-reliability-issues/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-hamr-technology-is-not-ready-for-prime-time-still-has-reliability-issues/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2015 22:52:25 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=267024 Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is expected to significantly increase areal density of hard disk drive media in the coming years, which will ultimately help to increase capacities of HDDs to 100TB in 2025. However, according to Seagate, the technology still has issues with reliability and is not ready to hit the market. Moreover, according to …

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Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is expected to significantly increase areal density of hard disk drive media in the coming years, which will ultimately help to increase capacities of HDDs to 100TB in 2025. However, according to Seagate, the technology still has issues with reliability and is not ready to hit the market. Moreover, according to Seagate, two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) may make it to the market earlier than HAMR.

“In the future, we talked last year about two dimensional magnetic recording, we will be ready to ship that in the next year or two,” said Dave Mosley, president of operations and technology at Seagate, during the company’s analyst and investor strategic update earlier this month. “HAMR is still not ready for prime time, I was not tremendously happy with the progress made last year, but there was progress.”

seagate_hdd_savvio

The latest high-capacity hard disk drives from Seagate and Western Digital Corp. are based on media that relies on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology with over 1Tbpsi (Terra-bit per square inch) areal density. HAMR technology will increase areal density of HDD media to 2Tbpsi in the coming years and then to 4Tbpsi or even 5Tbpsi.

Seagate, Western Digital and other makers of hard disk drives and their components have demonstrated HAMR-based HDDs for a number of times now, but it looks like the technology is still not ready for commercial products and there are no breakthroughs incoming.

“The highest areal density that we see today have to be written with HAMR,” said Mr. Mosley. “We still have some issues working through the reliability. We have actually solved a lot of problems, but the whole industry – through various consortiums – is really focused on getting the last of the problems solved so we could get [HAMR] into the products.”

seagate_technology_roadmap

Seagate intends to ship HAMR-based HDDs to select customers in late 2016 or in 2017, which means that mass production of such drives will begin at a later date. In the meantime, the company may start to make HDDs with TDMR technology in order to increase their capacities in 2016 or 2017.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Seagate remains very conservative about mass production of hard drives featuring HAMR – or TAMR [thermally-assisted magnetic recording] – technology and does not make any predictions. At the same time, Seagate is the only company, which is actually talking about HAMR.

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Seagate: We shipped four million SMR HDDs, happy with SMR tech https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-we-shipped-four-million-smr-hdds-happy-with-smr-tech/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-we-shipped-four-million-smr-hdds-happy-with-smr-tech/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2015 19:55:36 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=266970 Seagate Technology has been shipping hard disk drives based on media featuring shingled magnetic recording technology for about two years now, but so far the company has not shipped a lot of such drives. Nonetheless, Seagate seems to be happy with SMR and plans to expand shipments of SMR-based hard drives in the coming quarters. …

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Seagate Technology has been shipping hard disk drives based on media featuring shingled magnetic recording technology for about two years now, but so far the company has not shipped a lot of such drives. Nonetheless, Seagate seems to be happy with SMR and plans to expand shipments of SMR-based hard drives in the coming quarters.

Shingled magnetic recording increases areal density of HDD media by about 25 per cent by writing data on overlapping magnetic tracks compared to media based on perpendicular magnetic recording. The overlapping tracks may slow down the recording process since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten. In a bid to compensate lower writing performance of SMR-based hard drives, HDD makers have to tune firmware in a bid to maximize sequential writes to certain regions of the drive. Alternatively, operating systems or software should to “recognize” storage with SMR and only write sequentially to certain sectors.

seagate_archive_hdd

In general, hard drives featuring SMR media are slower than HDDs featuring perpendicular magnetic recording technology and therefore datacentres, which adopt them in a bid to increase storage capacities, have to tune their software, which is why sales of such drives have so far been slow. Nonetheless, before TDMR [two-dimensional magnetic recording] and HAMR [heat-assisted magnetic recording] arrive later this decade, SMR will be used to increase areal densities and capacities of HDDs. Moreover, Seagate has learnt how to hide disadvantages of SMR drives in a datacentre.

“We have shipped about four million of ‘shingled’ drives,” said Dave Mosley, president of operations and technology at Seagate, during the company’s analyst and investor strategic update earlier this month. “We view this as a very successful achievement because we have learnt a ton about our customers’ applications. We are ready to hide ‘shingled’ behind tiers and caches so that […] [our customers] don’t have to make tough changes to their software.”

seagate_hdd_barracuda_black

Seagate is working with its customers who want to tune their applications for SMR storage, but it is also adjusting its firmware to speed up such HDDs for cases, where changes to the apps are too complex or impossible.

“We are very happy with the progress that we have made [with SMR hard disk drives], we are shipping [shingled HDDs] for different platforms and are ready to get big enough in 2016,” said Mr. Mosley.

In addition to server-class hard disk drives, Seagate plans to use SMR for high-capacity client storage solutions. Keeping in mind that apps for client PCs will not change overnight, Seagate has to hide lower write performance of shingled magnetic recording by adjusting firmware of its products.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It looks like Seagate has big plans for shingled magnetic recording. While so far sales of SMR-based HDDs have been pretty low, in the future the company will increase their shipments.

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Seagate: Initial HDDs with HAMR will feature only 4TB capacity https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-initial-hdds-with-hamr-will-feature-only-4tb-capacity/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-initial-hdds-with-hamr-will-feature-only-4tb-capacity/#respond Sat, 22 Aug 2015 02:52:04 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=264555 Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology is expected to enable hard disk drives with considerably larger capacities compared to HDDs available today. However, the first hard drives featuring HAMR will not offer any breakthroughs since they will largely be designed to evaluate the tech and learn about mass production of such HDDs. Jan-Ulrich Thiele, the head …

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Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology is expected to enable hard disk drives with considerably larger capacities compared to HDDs available today. However, the first hard drives featuring HAMR will not offer any breakthroughs since they will largely be designed to evaluate the tech and learn about mass production of such HDDs.

Jan-Ulrich Thiele, the head of HAMR technology development at Seagate, recently disclosed additional details about the forthcoming hard disk drives featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording. The company will not pursue to offer breakthrough capacities with its first HAMR-based hard drives, reports Heise.de. The prototype HDDs that Seagate will deliver to select customers in late 2016 or in early 2017 will offer only about 4TB of capacity and will use platters with approximately 1.5Tbpsi (Terra-bit per square inch) areal density (around 50 per cent increase compared to today’s leading areal density).

Seagate’s HAMR technology heats magnetic media before writing data to around 450°C using a laser that has 810nm wavelength and 20mW power. At present, heads with lasers are slightly thicker than traditional heads, therefore, the distance between discs in the first generation of HAMR-based hard disk drives will increase compared to contemporary HDDs.

seagate_hdd_savvio

The company has serious plans to start commercial shipments of HAMR-based hard drives sometime in 2018, but field tests in late 2016 and throughout 2017 are supposed to demonstrate whether HAMR is ready for mass production. Initially, HAMR-based HDDs will be aimed at select cloud and hyperscale datacentre customers, but eventually the technology will migrate to consumer products.

HAMR is only the first step in a series of advanced recording technology for HDDs. Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, last year showcased a roadmap of HDD evolution. The roadmap covers multiple magnetic recording technologies and spans to 2025 and beyond. ASTC expects hard drives with 100TB+ capacities to emerge around 10 years from now.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It is noteworthy that Seagate is very vocal about HAMR, whereas Western Digital Corp. and Toshiba Corp. prefer not to talk about the tech a lot right now. Perhaps, this indicates that Seagate is ahead of its rivals with thermal-assisted magnetic recording method.

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Seagate demos HAMR HDDs, vows to start shipments in 2017 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-demos-hamr-hdds-vows-to-start-commercial-shipments-in-late-2017/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-demos-hamr-hdds-vows-to-start-commercial-shipments-in-late-2017/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2015 20:02:00 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=256418 Seagate Technology this week demonstrated a NAS packed with hard disk drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. While the company claims that the NAS worked flawlessly, Seagate again reconsidered the launch timeframe for its HAMR HDDs and delayed them to 2017 – 2018. Nonetheless, the company is already working on heated-dot magnetic recording …

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Seagate Technology this week demonstrated a NAS packed with hard disk drives that use heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. While the company claims that the NAS worked flawlessly, Seagate again reconsidered the launch timeframe for its HAMR HDDs and delayed them to 2017 – 2018. Nonetheless, the company is already working on heated-dot magnetic recording (HDMR) tech, which will enable 100TB+ drives a decade from now.

Seagate shows off NAS with HAMR-based HDDs

At the IEEE International Magnetics Conference (InterMag), Seagate demonstrated its Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS that fits eight hot-swappable 3.5” drives with Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface and is powered by a dual-core Intel Atom processor for storage applications as well as Seagate NAS OS (which is a custom embedded Linux). The NAS was loaded with eight hard disk drives featuring HAMR platters, which worked in a RAID configuration. Seagate ran a mixture of videos, and also recorded a live camera stream.

“The system worked perfectly, it ran continuously for three days, and was another powerful milestone in our journey to ship HAMR drives to select customers by 2017, with full production in 2018,” wrote Mark Re, chief technology officer at Seagate, in a blog post.

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Seagate did not disclose any details about the HAMR-based hard drives. What we do know about them is that they use industry-standard Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface and can work with modern network area storage devices, which means that their power consumption and heat dissipation is comparable to those of today’s HDDs. The company already has appropriate electronics (e.g., controller chips, firmware, etc.), motors, read/write heads and other hardware necessary to build HAMR-based drives. Moreover, the demonstration shows that Seagate’s HAMR hard disks are already compatible with the company’s software. Finally, the drives not only work, but can be actually used for demanding workloads.

HAMR: The enabler for 40TB – 50TB hard disk drives

Modern leading-edge hard disk drives can store up to 10TB of data on seven 1.43TB platters with ~0.95Tbpsi (Terra-bit per square inch) areal density. Many believe that 1Tbpsi is the limit for perpendicular magnetic recording and shingled magnetic recording technologies used today, but Seagate’s recently introduced 4TB 2.5” hard drive actually features slightly higher areal density of around 1.056Tbpsi.

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Capacities of contemporary hard disk drives are – among other things – constrained by the areal density. The latter is constrained by the physical size of “pitches” on hard disk drives media required to store a single bit of information. Nowadays the pitches are already very small and if they are made considerably smaller – to cram more pitches on a standard disk platter – it will be impossible to write data into them because it is not possible to produce a more powerful magnetic field in the smaller space using current technologies. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology magnetically records data on high-stability media (such as iron platinum alloy) with laser thermal assistance to heat the material and reduce its coercivity for a short amount of time required to write one bit. HAMR allows to significantly reduce the size of “pitches” without negative effects on read-ability, write-ability and stability. Hard drives with HAMR technology will feature considerably higher bit densities and will therefore store more data than today’s hard HDDs featuring perpendicular recording tech.

Industry experts believe that HAMR – or TAMR [thermally-assisted magnetic recording] – will help to increase areal density of magnetic platters to 2Tbpsi in the coming years and then to up to 4Tbpsi or even 5Tbpsi. Such areal densities will enable enterprise-class six-platter hard drives with capacities of 40TB or 50TB as well as 25TB – 32TB consumer-class HDDs.

Availability of HAMR

Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu as well as other makers of hard drives, HDD platters and HDD heads have demonstrated prototype drives with HAMR for a number of times in the recent years and revealed different timeframes of their commercial availability. For example, last year TDK predicted that HAMR drives would debut in 2015, whereas Seagate anticipated to start shipments of HAMR HDDs in 2016 – 2017.

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As it appears, Seagate is now more conservative regarding volume shipments of drives with HAMR technology than it used to be. The company promises to ship HAMR drives to select customers in 2017 and enter full production in 2018. Typically, it means that Seagate plans to use HAMR for select enterprise-class models first and may not even sell such drives to all clients. Starting 2018, the company will begin to mass produce HAMR-based drives for certain mass market segments, but it remains to be seen when such HDDs reach mainstream price-points.

Beyond HAMR

HAMR is not the pinnacle of hard disk drive evolution. Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, last year demonstrated a roadmap describing the evolution of hard disk drives going forward. The roadmap covers multiple magnetic recording technologies and spans to 2025 and beyond.

astc_technology_roadmap

At InterMag Seagate also presented a new paper that discussed a new technology called “heated-dot magnetic recording,” or HDMR, that should enable areal densities up to 10Tbpsi. HDMR combines the techniques used in HAMR with bit-patterned media and, possibly, two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

Thanks to storage media with 10Tbpsi areal densities, it will be possible to build 100TB+ hard drives a little more than 10 years from now.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It is obvious that hard disk drives featuring HAMR technology will be available later this decade. However, it is also clear that it is taking a longer time to transit to a new type of magnetic media than it used to before. Is it a local problem with thermally-assisted magnetic recording and the evolution of HDDs will continue at a rapid pace once all the challenges get resolved? Or the hard drive evolution is getting generally slower from now on because of slower migration to newer magnetic recording technologies? Only time will tell.

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Shipments of hard disk drives hit multi-year low in Q1 2015 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/shipments-of-hard-disk-drives-hit-multi-year-low-in-q1-2015/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/shipments-of-hard-disk-drives-hit-multi-year-low-in-q1-2015/#comments Sat, 30 May 2015 20:12:13 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=251960 Shipments of hard disk drives tanked significantly in the first quarter of the year due to sharp declines of sales of both PC and non-PC HDDs. Western Digital Corp. retained its position as the largest supplier of hard drives, Seagate Technology came second and Toshiba Corp. was the distant third. Average selling prices of HDDs …

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Shipments of hard disk drives tanked significantly in the first quarter of the year due to sharp declines of sales of both PC and non-PC HDDs. Western Digital Corp. retained its position as the largest supplier of hard drives, Seagate Technology came second and Toshiba Corp. was the distant third. Average selling prices of HDDs remained flat during the quarter.

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Worst quarter in many years

The total available market of hard disk drives in Q1 2015 was 125 million units, according to estimates by the two leading HDD manufacturers as well as by independent analysts. The market declined by 9.5 per cent year-over-year and by 11.3 per cent quarter-over-quarter. Both annual and sequential declines are more significant than in the recent years.

hdd_shipments_q1_2015

In the first quarter of 2015 sales of HDDs hit multi-year low. There were only two instances in the last five years when sales of hard disk drives declined to below 130 million units per quarter. In Q1 2009 because of global economic crisis and drastic PC market contraction, sales of HDDs dropped to around 111 million units. In Q4 2011 due to devastating floods in Thailand actual shipments of hard drives by all manufacturers declined to 119.1 million units.

WD remains on top

Western Digital remained the volume leader on the market of hard disk drives with 54.527 million HDD units sold. The company controlled 43.62 per cent of the HDD market. WD reported declines in sales of all types of its products, including client, enterprise, branded and consumer electronics.

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Seagate Technology came second with 50.1 million units shipped. The manufacturer commanded 40.08 per cent of the hard disk drive market. Seagate experienced sales declines nearly across the board, but shipments of enterprise-class HDDs were flat quarter-over-quarter and up 18.1 per cent year-over-year.

Toshiba sold 20.373 million HDDs in total and had market share of 16.3 per cent, according to KitGuru estimates. Sales of Toshiba dropped noticeably for the first time in about 1.5 years.

Client PC HDDs

Shipments of hard disk drives for client computers – both desktops and notebooks – were down both sequentially and annually. According to estimates by Seagate and WD, sales of desktop drives were down 11.3 per cent quarter-over-quarter and 23.7 per cent year-over-year. Mobile HDD declined 13 per cent QoQ and 7 per cent YoY, according to figures by the two leading makers of hard disk drives.

Based on the data from International Data Corp., worldwide PC shipments totalled 68.5 million units in the first quarter of 2015, a year-on-year decline of 6.7 per cent. IDC claims that 68.5 million units is the lowest recorded volume since Q1 2009. Given the industry trend, it is not surprising that sales of consumer-class HDDs for client applications dropped substantially.

It is unknown how significantly sales of client solid-state drives impacted shipments of hard disk drives during the quarter. However, it is clear that SSDs as well as tablets represent lost sales for makers of hard disk drives.

hdd_shipments_q1_2015_types

Enterprise HDDs

Shipments of enterprise hard drives were more or less flat quarter-over-quarter. According to TrendFocus, sales of high-performance enterprise hard drives were flat, while shipments of nearline HDDs fell 5% quarter-over-quarter.

Seagate managed to widen the gap with Western Digital and sold 9.1 million of enterprise-class HDDs in the first quarter. Western Digital sold 7.519 million enterprise hard drives, a decline of 6.5 per cent quarter-over-quarter and an increase of 5.4 per cent over the same period a year ago.

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In general, the market of enterprise-class hard disk drives is steadily expanding fuelled by the growth of cloud datacenters. Enterprise-class solid-state drives impact sales of ultra-high-performance 10K and 15K HDDs, but since the world needs a lot of capacious hard drives, it is likely that enterprise HDDs will flourish for many years to come.

Branded and consumer electronics HDDs

Shipments of branded and consumer electronics HDDs declined noticeably quarter-over-quarter at both Seagate and Western Digital. WD was ahead of its rival in this segment of the market and its unit shipments (6.09 million CE drives and 8.61 million branded HDDs) were actually flat compared to the first quarter of 2014. Sales of Seagate’s CE and branded storage solutions declined year-over-year to 4.8 million and 5.1 million, respectively.

Average selling prices remain flat

Average selling prices of hard disk drives have not changed significantly for well over two years now. Seagate’s ASP was $62 per unit and Western Digital’s ASP was $61 per drive. Since Seagate traditionally sells more enterprise-class hard disk drives, its average selling prices are higher compared to those of its arch-rival.

hdd_shipments_q1_2015_asps

Given the fact that there are only three hard drives makers left on the planet, it is unlikely that HDDs will get significantly cheaper in general any time soon. In fact, rises and declines of HDD ASPs in the recent years were conditioned either by the global economic crisis of 2008 – 2009, or by the natural disaster in Thailand in 2011.

Future remains unclear

The market of hard disk drives generally reflects global high-tech industry trends. However, there are a number of factors that have direct impact on HDD shipments: sales of solid-state drives for client PCs; shipments of tablets and smartphones; demand for game consoles and digital video recorders with HDDs inside and some other.

hgst_wd_ultrastar_15k

Two key things that will influence shipments of HDDs this year are expected to be the introduction of Intel Corp.’s “Skylake” microprocessors and the release of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 10. If the launch of Intel “Skylake” processors and Windows 10 mostly catalyse demand for high-end ultra-thin laptops that use solid-state drives, then HDD makers will continue to experience declines in their shipments. However, of the new chip and the operating system manage to revive the whole PC market, then the global total available market of hard disk drives may get back to historical 140 million units per quarter.

Please note that the story features charts that contain data attributed to fiscal, not calendar, quarters and years. For Seagate and Western Digital fiscal year begins in the third calendar quarter.

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KitGuru Says: Unfortunately, data by Seagate and Western Digital does not reveal how significantly sales of HDDs suffer from growing shipments of SSDs. In fact, this is the main intrigue of the storage market today.

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Seagate denies intention to re-introduce 5.25-inch HDDs https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-denies-intention-to-re-introduce-5-25-inch-hdds/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-denies-intention-to-re-introduce-5-25-inch-hdds/#respond Mon, 30 Mar 2015 22:59:18 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=242818 Seagate Technology has clarified its position regarding bringing 5.25” form-factor hard disk drive to the market. Apparently, the company does not have any plans to reintroduce hard disk drives in the outdated form-factors. “Seagate has absolutely no plans to pursue a 5.25” drive, and does not (and has not) promoted any messages whatsoever around the …

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Seagate Technology has clarified its position regarding bringing 5.25” form-factor hard disk drive to the market. Apparently, the company does not have any plans to reintroduce hard disk drives in the outdated form-factors.

“Seagate has absolutely no plans to pursue a 5.25” drive, and does not (and has not) promoted any messages whatsoever around the drive,” a spokesperson for the company told KitGuru.

Last week senior director of cloud initiatives at Seagate in EMEA region pondered over a possibility to create high-capacity hard disk drives in 5.25” form-factor for cloud datacentres. But while he considered such an option, this does not mean that the company is working on something like that.

wd_raid_edition_hdd_artwork

Physically large hard drives with large platters can increase per-drive storage capacities to 15TB today. However, such drives will also consume considerably higher amount of energy than 3.5” HDDs. Besides, they will vibrate more and will produce more noise and heat. Moreover, infrastructure of modern datacentre hardware is tailored for 2.5” and 3.5” hard drives, which means that re-introduction of 5.25” HDDs would require redevelopment of many things in the datacentre.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Looks like resurrection of 5.25” form-factor for hard drives is not something that can happen. Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba will rely on new recording technologies as a primary way for increasing HDD capacities.

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Seagate: 5.25-inch hard disk drives could return to datacentres https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-5-25-inch-hard-disk-drives-could-return-to-datacentres/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-5-25-inch-hard-disk-drives-could-return-to-datacentres/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2015 23:59:27 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=242250 Traditionally, once a technology becomes obsolete, it falls into oblivion and only a handful of people actually remember it. Today, not a lot of people recall, what is diskette, cathode-ray tube display or 5.25” hard disk drive. But while diskettes and CRTs are not coming back, 5.25” HDDs may get their chance. “Watch out this …

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Traditionally, once a technology becomes obsolete, it falls into oblivion and only a handful of people actually remember it. Today, not a lot of people recall, what is diskette, cathode-ray tube display or 5.25” hard disk drive. But while diskettes and CRTs are not coming back, 5.25” HDDs may get their chance.

“Watch out this space,” said Joe Fagan, senior director of cloud initiatives at Seagate in EMEA region, in an interview with Techradar.

FOLLOW UP: Seagate denies intention to re-introduce 5.25-inch HDDs.

seagate_nas_hdd_3

The amount of data that modern hyper-scale datacentres need to store is already overwhelming and it continues to grow exponentially. In the recent years many hard drive makers introduced multiple ways to increase capacities of storage devices, but things like shingled magnetic recording as well as helium-filled hard drives may not be the only ways to boost HDD capacities. Seagate Technology hints that the industry could return 5.25” hard disk drives to the market, which will dramatically increase per-HDD capacity, something that will be extremely useful for cold data storage applications.

“Hyperscale customers are the one giving momentum for the search for a new form-factor,” said Mr. Fagan. “It is all about the storage capacity per unit volume.”

The majority of data stored in modern datacentres – up to 80 per cent, according to some estimates – is inactive or “cold”; it is not accessed, or updated. Because it is very expensive to store petabytes of information that is almost never used, many datacentres nowadays build cost-optimized cold data storage infrastructure. With the purpose of minimizing costs, such storage solutions do not utilise RAID or any other sophisticated technologies used for “hot” data storage devices. The main goals of cold data storage solutions is to store maximum amount of data per cubic meter of a datacentre while consuming the lowest amount of energy.

Physically large hard drives with large platters can naturally increase the amount of data stored per cubic meter of a datacentre. However, such drives will also consume considerably higher amount of energy than 3.5” HDDs. They will also vibrate more and will produce more noise and heat. However, since 5″ platters can store at least two times more data than 3.5″ platters, we are talking about 3TB platters with the current leading-edge areal density. Five of such platters could enable 15TB HDDs today.

wd_raid_edition_hdd_inside

Hard disk drives in 5.25” form-factor disappeared from the market in the late 1990s because personal computers got considerably smaller than in the 1980s and 3.5” hard drives could provide enough capacity and performance for most users and datacentres. At present 5.25” form-factor is used mostly by optical disk drives and card readers, but not by HDDs. At present there are no platters, motors or heads suitable for such storage devices. If one decides to resurrect the form-factor, this company will have to develop both internal components as well as external infrastructure for such HDDs since modern datacentre hardware is tailored for 2.5″ and 3.5″ hard drives. Given that such development takes years, do not expect 5.25″ HDDs to re-emerge any time soon.

Ironically, Seagate Technology was among the first to introduce 5.25” hard drives in 1980. If the company decides to actually go on with larger HDDs, it will basically give birth to the same form-factor two times.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While 5.25” HDDs could make sense for scale-out datacentres and the idea to increase the size of a HDD platter sounds like a logical idea, it just does not seem like this is the right way to go. There is heat-assisted magnetic recording incoming, there is bit patterned media coming after HAMR, there is a roadmap towards 100TB HDDs by 2025.  All-in-all, it just does not make too much sense to use physically large HDDs.

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Seagate to release 10TB hard disk drive next year https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-to-release-10tb-hard-disk-drive-next-year/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-to-release-10tb-hard-disk-drive-next-year/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2014 23:59:49 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=227825 Seagate Technology is on track to rapidly boost capacity of hard disk drives for datacenters and will release a 10TB model in 2015. The company currently has no plans to manufacture helium-filled HDDs since such technology is too expensive. However, Seagate intends to use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology next year and pins a lot …

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Seagate Technology is on track to rapidly boost capacity of hard disk drives for datacenters and will release a 10TB model in 2015. The company currently has no plans to manufacture helium-filled HDDs since such technology is too expensive. However, Seagate intends to use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology next year and pins a lot of hopes on heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology going forward.

Seagate’s 10TB HDD will sport six 1.66TB SMR platters, Seagate revealed in an interview with Akiba PC Hotline. The company admits that performance of such hard disk drives is rather low due to the nature of shingled magnetic recording technology and other factors. However, the firm claims that it is possible to hide some of SMR’s drawbacks by installing large DRAM caches on hard drives. Moreover extreme capacity HDDs are not used as boot drives, so their performance issues will hardly be noticed.

seagate_nas_hdd_3

One of the world’s largest makers of hard drives is confident that it will be able to release commercial HDDs featuring HAMR technology in 2016 – 2017. Thanks to HAMR, hard drives will gain around 30 per cent capacity every year in the future. However, to use heat-assisted method, Seagate will need to advance HDD heads and media. Seagate will demonstrate working prototypes of HAMR HDDs sometimes next year, the company said.

By contrast, Seagate does not seem to consider sealed helium-filled HDDs. Such drives require completely different process technology to manufacture and thus are more expensive than traditional hard disk drives. Seagate does not believe that helium-filled hard drives will even become cost-effective enough for consumers (consumers do not require HDD with extreme amount of platters anyway), which is why it does not see many reasons to offer such drives even to enterprise customers.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Seagate seems to be rather optimistic about the future of hard disk drives. The company has a solid roadmap that it is going to execute. Apparently, Seagate knows how to solve technological challenges with HAMR and other technologies, therefore, the skies are blue ahead of the company.

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Toshiba unveils enterprise 6TB HDD with 7200rpm spindle speed https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/toshiba-introduces-enterprise-class-6tb-hdd-with-7200rpm-spindle-speed/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/toshiba-introduces-enterprise-class-6tb-hdd-with-7200rpm-spindle-speed/#respond Thu, 18 Dec 2014 11:25:21 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=227051 Toshiba Corp. late on Thursday introduced its first 6TB enterprise-class hard disk drive with 7200rpm spindle speed. The new HDD will be a part of the MG04 family, which is specifically designed for midline and nearline business critical workloads, introduced earlier this year and features persistent write cache technology. Toshiba MG04 6TB hard disk drive …

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Toshiba Corp. late on Thursday introduced its first 6TB enterprise-class hard disk drive with 7200rpm spindle speed. The new HDD will be a part of the MG04 family, which is specifically designed for midline and nearline business critical workloads, introduced earlier this year and features persistent write cache technology.

Toshiba MG04 6TB hard disk drive features Serial ATA-6Gb/s (MG04ACA) or SAS-12Gb/s (MG04SCA) interfaces and sport 7200rpm spindle speed and 128MB cache. It is unclear whether the new MG04 HDDs are based on six 1TB platters or five 1.2TB platters. Power consumption figures for the drives were also not revealed by Toshiba. Maximum power consumption of other MG04 hard drives is 11.3W; in idle mode the drives consume 6W – 6.2W.

The new enterprise hard disk drives support both industry-standard 4K native and 512e advanced format sector technologies for optimum performance in the latest generation servers and storage systems. Emulated 512e AF sector technology performs best in legacy applications requiring 512 sector lengths using aligned-write environments.

toshiba_mg04_hdd

The new MG04 family of HDD also supports optional persistent write cache technologies that help to protect against data-loss in the event of sudden power loss, while also helping to improve performance and data reliability. Models supporting sanitize instant erase (SIE) option are also available.

“Our customers expect to benefit from the increased capacity, efficiency and performance made possible by the latest industry-standard interface and long sector technologies,” said Scott Wright, director of HDD product marketing at Toshiba storage products business unit. “These additions to the MG04 series deliver an impressive 6TB capacity and continue to provide the benefits of Toshiba’s persistent write cache technology to improve performance for business critical server and storage systems.”

The 6TB MG04ACA SATA and MG04SCA 12-Gb/s SAS models will begin sampling to OEM customers in Q1 2015.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The key thing about the new drives has not been disclosed: the amount and capacity of platters inside the drive. If Toshiba managed to squeeze in six platters into one 3.5” hard drive, then it is a technical breakthrough for Toshiba. If the company uses 1.2TB platters, then someone has started to sell 1.2TB enterprise-grade platters to Toshiba, which is a technical breakthrough of another company.

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Industry consortium predicts 100TB hard drives in 2025 https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/industry-consortium-predicts-100tb-hard-drives-in-2025/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/industry-consortium-predicts-100tb-hard-drives-in-2025/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:28:10 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=223538 At the recent Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) conference Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, demonstrated a new HDD roadmap. Apparently, rapid increases in areal density of hard drive media will allow HDD makers to create hard drives with up to …

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At the recent Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) conference Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), which unites numerous makers of hard disk drives as well as developers of storage solutions, demonstrated a new HDD roadmap. Apparently, rapid increases in areal density of hard drive media will allow HDD makers to create hard drives with up to 100TB capacity by 2025.

Modern hard drives use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology which once enabled a rapid HDD capacity boost, but is no longer quickly evolving. It is also believed that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology will not bring a lot of capacity benefits to hard drives as well, according to the roadmap. Members of ASTC believe that the next big thing in hard disk drives is heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which will be massively introduced into HDDs by 2017, increasing the average annual areal density growth rate to 30% (it is currently about 15%), reports Forbes.

astc_technology_roadmap

At present advanced hard drive media features 0.86Tbpsi (Terra-bit per square inch) areal density. HAMR technology is projected to increase it to 2Tbpsi – 4Tbpsi in the coming years, thus significantly increasing capacities of hard drives to 20TB+ in the next five years.

Sometimes in 2021 the industry is expected to migrate to bit pattern media (with the magnetic media broken into small regions on the disk surface) combined with an extension to SMR called two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

Eventually bit pattern media with TMDR will be combined with HAMR – which will be called heated-dot magnetic recording, or HDMR – boosting areal densities to 10Tbpsi by 2025. Thanks to storage media with 10Tbpsi areal densities, it will be possible to build 100TB+ hard drives a little more than 10 years from now.

While solid-state storage is rapidly catching up with hard disk drives in terms of capacity these days, it remains to be seen whether companies like Intel, Samsung, Toshiba or Micron will be able to continue to keep the pace once HAMR and BPMR technologies enter the market.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Looks like hard drives will continue to be used as primary storage devices for huge amounts of data for at least another decade…

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WD unveils HDDs for ‘cold’ data storage apps with variable capacity https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wd-unveils-hdds-for-cold-data-storage-apps-with-variable-capacity/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wd-unveils-hdds-for-cold-data-storage-apps-with-variable-capacity/#respond Thu, 11 Sep 2014 22:52:18 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=211386 Western Digital this week introduced its new WD Ae hard disk drives for “cold” data storage applications that will come in 6TB-class capacities, which will vary. The company will supply such drives to select customers, who operate datacentres or build storage devices for them. The point of variable capacities, which WD calls “progressive capacity” is …

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Western Digital this week introduced its new WD Ae hard disk drives for “cold” data storage applications that will come in 6TB-class capacities, which will vary. The company will supply such drives to select customers, who operate datacentres or build storage devices for them. The point of variable capacities, which WD calls “progressive capacity” is to provide maximum amount of storage per single drive.

While approximately 20-30 per cent of data on most networks or cloud storage centres is active and frequently accessed (such data is usually called “hot”), the majority of data, 70-80 per cent, according to WD, is inactive or “cold,” meaning it is unchanging and infrequently accessed. Since it is hard and expensive to store petabytes of information that is not accessed, used or updated, many datacentres these days build cost-optimized cold data storage infrastructure. In order to minimize costs, those storage solutions do not use RAID or any other sophisticated technologies used for “hot” data storage devices. The main goals of cold data storage applications is to store maximum amount of data per cubic meter of a datacentre while consuming the lowest amount of energy. The WD Ae HDDs were designed with these two purposes in mind. Previously such hard drives were built for very special customers only.

“Modern datacenter customers came to us with a need for an HDD solution designed specifically for ever-expanding cold-data repositories,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, storage technology, WD. “Now in our third generation with over 700 petabytes deployed, WD is bringing the WD Ae drive to the broader market, representing another vital component of WD’s capacity storage portfolio, which delivers features and product attributes optimized for the rapidly evolving storage market.”

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WD Ae hard disk drives are based on a platform specially optimized for cold data storage applications. The platform features improved power management, reduced heat output, and next-generation technologies such as IntelliSeek. The WD Ae HDDs come in 3.5” form factor and feature 5760rpm spindle speed, 64MB cache, five high-capacity platters as well as Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface. When it comes to capacity, then everything is not that simple: WD Ae has capacity of 6.3TB today, but eventually its capacity is projected to grow.

Traditionally HDD makers increase HDD capacities with certain large increments (e.g., 500GB or 1TB) in order to position them on the market in a right way. With WD Ae, Western Digital plans to drop such practice and ship drives with different capacities, e.g., 6.3TB, 6.4TB or 6.5TB, which will allow organizations who qualified the drives for their applications to get higher amount of storage eventually.

wd_ae_hdd

According to Western Digital, magnetic platters for hard drives are in many ways similar to semiconductors and semiconductor wafers. As technology and manufacturing processes mature over time, incremental capacity increases are realized. As manufacturing process of WD Ae’s platters matures, WD will ship HDDs with higher capacities. At the massive scale of modern applications, the availability of incremental capacity each quarter renders exceptional value to datacentres who can realize improvements in capacity-per-drive, capacity-per-volumetric space and reduced infrastructure overhead.

WD Ae hard drives will be sold in box quantities of 20 and available to select distributors and integrators starting late 2014. WD Ae drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While the idea of variable capacity seems rather strange and to a certain degree resembles situation with microprocessors with odd amount of cores, it still may bring a lot of advantages to certain customers with huge datacentres that require to store huge amounts of “cold” data at low cost.

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Seagate reveals world’s first 8TB hard disk drives https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-reveals-worlds-first-8tb-hard-disk-drives/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-reveals-worlds-first-8tb-hard-disk-drives/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2014 16:21:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=209005 Seagate Technology on Tuesday unveiled the world’s first hard disk drives with 8TB capacity. The HDDs are designed for scale-out data infrastructures that require maximum capacities at minimal footprints. Seagate did not reveal a lot of technical details about its 8TB hard disk drives, but it said that the HDDs come in 3.5” form-factor, use …

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Seagate Technology on Tuesday unveiled the world’s first hard disk drives with 8TB capacity. The HDDs are designed for scale-out data infrastructures that require maximum capacities at minimal footprints.

Seagate did not reveal a lot of technical details about its 8TB hard disk drives, but it said that the HDDs come in 3.5” form-factor, use the Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface and feature enterprise-class reliability as well as multi-drive RV tolerance for consistent enterprise-class performance in high density environments. Super-sized capacity of 8TB allows to store maximum amount of data per rack, which therefore improves storage densities and maximizes efficiencies of data-centers.

The hard drive maker did not unveil how many platters do the 8TB HDDs use and what type of magnetic recording technology they utilize. Earlier this year it was believed that 8TB hard disk drives feature platters based on shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, but Seagate neither confirmed nor denied the information. The SMR platters are projected to offer lower performance compared to perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, but Seagate also did not reveal any performance figures.

seagate_hdd_barracuda

“As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. “Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world’s first 8TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.”

Seagate said that it is shipping the 8TB drives to select customers now with wide scale availability next quarter.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will be extremely interesting to learn more about technologies behind Seagate’s 8TB HDD as well as its performance. If Seagate managed to bring performance of SMR-based drives closer to that of PMR-powered drives, it could use the new recording technology for consumer hard drives as well, which means an increase of their capacities.

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Seagate ships 8TB ‘customer development’ hard drives https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-ships-8tb-customer-development-hard-drives/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/seagate-ships-8tb-customer-development-hard-drives/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2014 16:22:27 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=203624 Seagate Technology on Thursday said that it had shipped the first samples of hard disk drives (HDDs) with 8TB capacity to its customers. The company did not reveal any peculiarities regarding the product or the name of its clients. “We have also delivered 8TB customer development units to major customers and cloud service providers and …

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Seagate Technology on Thursday said that it had shipped the first samples of hard disk drives (HDDs) with 8TB capacity to its customers. The company did not reveal any peculiarities regarding the product or the name of its clients.

“We have also delivered 8TB customer development units to major customers and cloud service providers and the initial customer feedback has been very positive,” said Steve Luczo, chairman and chief executive officer of Seagate, during a conference call with financial analysts and investors.

seagate_hdd_barracuda_black

Seagate did not disclose any details regarding the drive, but there are not a lot of ways to build an HDD of such huge capacity nowadays:

  • Increase the amount of platters per drive. Seagate could follow its rival HGST with sealed hard disk drives. It is possible to fill a drive with a gas that is less dense than the air (e.g., Helium, like in the case of HGST’s Ultrastar He6) and then squeeze seven (or even eight Seagate it manages to develop all-new magnetic recording heads) current-generation enterprise-class 3.5” platters of enhanced capacity (1TB – 1.1TB). Such approach greatly works for server-class drives, but it is clearly too expensive for consumer-oriented HDDs.
  • Increase areal density of platters. Seagate could install six enterprise-class platters featuring shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology into a non-sealed drive. SMR helps to increase areal density of HDD platters by 25 per cent compared to current-gen platters featuring perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. While SMR is not yet widely used even for consumer hard drives, it is possible that the technology progresses so successfully that Seagate already has samples of enterprise-class SMR platters. Hard drives with five or six platters are usually designed for servers.
  • Significantly increase areal density of platters. Seagate could ship prototypes of drives based on platters that feature HAMR [heat-assisted magnetic recording] technology. Back in 2012 TDK demonstrated 2TB HAMR platters for 3.5” HDDs, so Seagate could use them to test-drive HAMR hard drives with its PC and server customers.

It is unknown which method Seagate chose for its 8TB hard disk drive.

Keeping in mind that Seagate talks about 8TB “customer development units”, the actual commercial drives of such capacity are probably several quarters, if not years, away from mass production and adoption.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: It will be interesting to see what exactly Seagate shipped to its customers. All three options are interesting, but if the company is finally on-track to commercially produce HAMR-based HDDs in the foreseeable future, then this is a sensation.

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WD’s HGST debuts world’s first 1.8TB 10K HDD https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wds-hgst-debuts-worlds-first-1-8tb-10k-hdd/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/wds-hgst-debuts-worlds-first-1-8tb-10k-hdd/#respond Thu, 10 Jul 2014 22:59:24 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=202553 HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of rapid speed and requiring 24/7 …

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HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., this week introduced the industry’s first hard disk drive with 1.8TB capacity, 10K rpm spindle speed and SAS-12Gb/s interface. The drive will be used in mission-critical applications that do not require maximum possible performance offered by solid-state storage solutions, but take advantage of rapid speed and requiring 24/7 availability.

Based on HGST’s field proven 2.5” small form-factor high-quality design, the 2.5” enterprise-class Ultrastar C10K1800 combines high capacity with a significant improvement in both random write and sequential performance for mission-critical storage applications requiring 24/7 availability, according to the manufacturer.

HGST Ultrastar C10K1800 hard drives available in 300GB, 450GB, 600GB, 900GB, 1.2TB and 1.8TB capacities are powered by the latest-generation enterprise-class 2.5” platters with 580Gb/sq.in or 620Gb/sq.in areal density (the drives integrate from one to four platters). The new drives feature 10520 rpm spindle speed, 128MB cache buffer, 2.85ms average latency, 3.3 – 4.4ms seek time as well as sustained transfer rates from media to host between 129MB/s and 247MB/s (depending on the capacity, sector size, physical location of data on media and other factors). The drives consume up to 5.7W – 7.4W of power depending on the model.

The Ultrastar C10K1800-series hard disk drives feature HGST’s media cache architecture – a disk-based caching technology, which provides a large non-volatile cache on the media resulting in improved reliability and data integrity during unexpected power loss, as well as a significant improvement in write performance even at high workloads when compared to solutions with limited NAND or flash-based NVC.

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According to the manufacturer, as the demand for enterprise-class storage grows, customers are deploying tiered storage infrastructures built along a range of raw IOPS performance, capacity and $/GB price efficiencies. While solid state drives (SSDs) and 15K HDDs are designed for maximum performance, the demand for 10K HDDs remains to be strong as customers seek better $/GB metrics.

“Our customers continue to contend with explosive data growth, balancing disparate application loads, while needing to improve data center space and power efficiencies,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. “By fusing unmatched capacity with ultimate performance in the same drive, the Ultrastar C10K1800 offers the optimal balance of capacity, performance and cost. We expect our customers to use the Ultrastar C10K1800 with a complement of SSDs and 15K performance HDDs in tiered pools of storage.”

The Ultrastar C10K1800 hard drive family is now shipping, and is being qualified by select OEMs. The FIPS certified models will be available in January 2015. The drives come with two million hours MTBF rating and five-year warranty.

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KitGuru Says: While solid-stat drives are gaining market share, the demands for storage are growing so rapidly that there is plenty of need for fast hard disk drives as well, especially in tiered storage environments.

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Crashes of hard drives remain the leading cause of data loss https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/crashes-of-hard-drives-remain-the-leading-cause-of-data-loss/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/anton-shilov/crashes-of-hard-drives-remain-the-leading-cause-of-data-loss/#respond Wed, 11 Jun 2014 22:57:58 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=197737 At present there are loads of various digital devices around, since every single one of them can fail, the chances to lose  precious data are pretty high in general. However, according to a recent global survey by Kroll Ontrack, the leading provider of data recovery and discovery products and services, failures of hard disk drives …

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At present there are loads of various digital devices around, since every single one of them can fail, the chances to lose  precious data are pretty high in general. However, according to a recent global survey by Kroll Ontrack, the leading provider of data recovery and discovery products and services, failures of hard disk drives remain the leading cause of data loss.

The lion’s share – 72 per cent – of those surveyed said that their latest data loss was a consequence of an HDD failure, that figure was followed by failures of SSDs (15 per cent) and RAID/virtual services (13 per cent). It is obvious that data loss impacts every type of storage devices and technologies from the consumer grade up to the enterprise level.

“While HDD shipments are on the decline according to IHS iSuppli report, they are still expected to outpace SSD shipments three to one in 2014,” said Paul le Messurier, programme and operations manager at Kroll Ontrack. “There are simply more hard drives in circulation because they are cost effective and manufacturers have perfected their design and production. As a result, HDDs comprise the vast majority of the data recoveries we address.”

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In the vast majority (66 per cent) of cases the most recent data loss was caused by a hardware crash or failure. In 14 per cent of cases the reason was a human error and in only 6 per cent of cases the cause of the data loss was a software failure.

“Storage media fails regardless of type; it is just a matter of when. This fact, coupled with the fact that HDDs are still the most prevalent drive is why HDD crashes have and continue to be the most common cause of data loss,” added Mr. Le Messurier. “To avoid such a failure, one should regularly defrag their computer, check its storage capacity, and run antivirus software as well as hard drive monitoring software. Beyond good health practices, businesses and home users should have working redundancies, such as a backup device or service in place, and continuity plan that is current and accessible in the event of a loss.”

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Among businesses, 27 per cent indicated their most recent loss interrupted a business process, such as denying them or their company from providing a product or service to their customers. A further 15 per cent admit to losing personal data from their business machine contrasted with 7 per cent whom acknowledged losing business-related data from their home machine.

“It isn’t surprising that critical business data is at stake among both company-owned and personal devices,” said Todd Johnson, vice president of data recovery operations, Kroll Ontrack. “Since data is key to how we function in both worlds, accessibility is critical and that is where we come in.”

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KitGuru Says: It is not surprising that hardware fails in general and we make mistakes. Unfortunately, in loads of cases there are no redundant copies of everything we own. The lack of those copies is the real reason why the data gets lost: everyone knows about hardware failures, human factors and software bugs. The only way to ensure that the data is preserved is to copy it…

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ADATA DashDrive Elite 500GB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Review https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/simon-telford/adata-dashdrive-elite-500gb-usb-3-0-external-hard-drive-review/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/hard-drives/simon-telford/adata-dashdrive-elite-500gb-usb-3-0-external-hard-drive-review/#respond Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:05:22 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=114948 The ADATA DashDrive Elite HE720 500GB USB 3.0 external enclosure is the slimmest of its kind, measuring in at only 8.9mm thick. It also sports a professional-looking brushed Stainless Steel surface with a scratch resistant coating. The company have also added a ‘One Touch Backup' which as the name suggests allows the user to back …

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The ADATA DashDrive Elite HE720 500GB USB 3.0 external enclosure is the slimmest of its kind, measuring in at only 8.9mm thick. It also sports a professional-looking brushed Stainless Steel surface with a scratch resistant coating. The company have also added a ‘One Touch Backup' which as the name suggests allows the user to back up essential data with a single touch.

Couple all this with a USB 3.0 connection, some simple backup software and it should offer great all-round performance.

Specifications

Capacity 500GB
Color Titanium
Dimensions (L x W x H) 117 x 79 x 8.9mm (4.6 x 3.1 x 0.4in)
Weight 164g (0.4 lb)
Interface (USB) SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (backward compatible with USB 2.0)
Interface (HDD) 2.5″ SATA II
System requirements Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 / Mac OS X 10.6 or later / Linux Kernel 2.6 or later
Temperature Operating 5ºC~50ºC; Storage -40ºC~60ºC
Accessories USB 3.0 cable; Quick Start Guide
Texture Stainless steel metal brushed surface, plus mirror-like polish
Warranty 3 years
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