This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Seagate-Enterprise-Drive

Seagate may have made waves final yr with its 60TB SSDs, but the company is yet first and foremost a magnetic storage provider. During its conference phone call yesterday, the hard drive manufacturer laid out its most-term roadmap, with ambitious plans to ramp drive capacities over the adjacent few years. Right now, Seagate's highest-cease drive tops out at 10TB, but the company plans to double that within the adjacent iii years, with 16TB drives rolling out as before long equally mid-2018. Seagate, according to CEO Steve Luczo, is in the heart of a major marketplace transition and is planning new products that capitalize on the changing storage market.

seagate-smr-vs-conventional-hard-drive-writing

Seagate has also deployed shingled magnetic recording to heave areal density of its drive platters, though the technology isn't a great fit for consumer products.

Measured strictly by unit sales, hard drive shipments are declining as SSDs chew steadily into their markets; Seagate's unit shipments apparently fell past ~10% terminal yr alone. Seagate is transitioning to prioritize different markets — ones where they build fewer, high-capacity drives equally opposed to focusing on shipping huge numbers of low-chapters parts. Here'south Luczo (quote courtesy of Seeking Alpha):

Then for the market place that we're in, we really would say, that it's probably going to be a growing market place, because we see growth in all those applications that require high chapters. And so within that obviously, because it'due south the highest capacity technology that we're using and so it's lots of heads and disk absorption, which goes forth with the units. Then every bit you know, going from viii to 10 to 12 to sixteen, you're going from six to eight disk, at least, on the nearline products and we do think there'due south opportunities for more than heads and disc on desktop and notebook, as people demand higher capacity as well.

So I think from an assimilation perspective, we feel pretty skillful – improve than pretty proficient about agenda 2022 in terms of what it ways in terms of our factory assimilation, which is really what you're asking. And no, we don't need a disk drive unit of measurement growth to drive factory absorption like nosotros used to, because the demand profile now is all about high capacity drives not virtually lots of little drives that aren't connected that go into PCs.

Consolidating into shipping higher-capacity large drives probably has some economy of calibration advantages for Seagate, and the company is looking to push into markets similar surveillance, where lower-capacity SSDs are at a singled-out disadvantage compared with the difficult drive market. But this only works if hard drives can maintain the gap between themselves and SSDs, which is why we've seen so many enterprise products pushing into college capacities. As for Seagate's 60TB SSD, yes such technology is possible, and one day information technology may even replace conventional hard drives altogether, merely not whatever time in the nigh future. Few companies would have the pockets to fund purchasing that kind of product; Seagate wanted to brand a statement about the futurity of solid state storage, not launch a new enterprise division.

Information technology'southward not clear however if the helium drives produced by companies like Seagate and pioneered at HGST volition ever come to the mainstream consumer market. I tend to think non, given the additional cost and complexity of these products, but if other techniques for boosting areal density on consumer drives don't pan out, it'south not impossible.

Now read: How do SSDs work?