The Evolution of HDDs in the Near Future: Speaking with Seagate CTO, Mark Re
by Anton Shilov on July 6, 2016 2:00 PM ESTConclusion
While the evolution of consumer HDDs in the recent years was not fast, things are about to change. Use of SMR will help to increase capacities of hard drives in the coming quarters and then TDMR will help to drive capacities again in the coming years. One thing that should be clear at this point is that the evolution of HDDs in the future will be slightly different from their development in the past. The reason for that is segmentation of the HDD market and the need for optimized configurations based on the application. Makers of hard drives tend to tailor their models for particular applications and one size does not fit all even in a segment of the market.
For example, archive, nearline, NAS, DAS and secondary HDDs for desktop PCs benefit from high capacities. However, performance barely matters for archive or DAS hard drives, whereas nearline and NAS have to be offer both storage space and relatively high performance. As a result, some HDDs just offer vast capacities and performance with the help of PMR, helium and 7200 rpm motors, whereas other rely on SMR and come with a lower spindle speed.
Things will not get any less complicated in the coming years because the technology to build HDDs that satisfy demands of end-users and cost reasonable amounts of money is not easy. As a result, some technologies, or a combination of technologies, will not be used to build all types of HDDs. Some things will remain mostly in the data center for Seagate (such as helium), other will be strictly aimed at the consumer (hybrid drives).
Moreover, Seagate and its rivals understand that HDDs cannot compete against SSDs when it comes to performance, especially random read/write performance. Therefore, while hard drives will get faster in the coming years, do not expect manufacturers to make performance their primary concern. At least, not when it comes to competition against SSDs. Density and power are primary concerns with a base level of performance.
Seagate's roadmap includes SMR, TDMR, HAMR as well as multiple other technologies. The company has been developing a set of technologies that should enable capacity, performance, reliability, and endurance of future HDDs featuring the aforementioned recording methods. What the company cannot be sure about is exact demand from various market segments, for example, demand for data center HDDs does not seem to be growing rapidly, but yet this is a segment that Seagate pins a lot of hopes on. Client storage is changing in general and while it is possible to predict what future client HDDs should offer, demand for client hard drives are still up for debate.
The situation with some of the upcoming technologies is pretty clear and exact products will be developed based on market performance, keeping in mind financial viability. Recently Seagate announced plans to adjust its manufacturing capacities in a bid to maintain financial stability, which will inevitably have an impact on its future products.
We would like to thank Mark Re for his time in discussing Seagate's future.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Seagate: Hard Disk Drives Set to Stay Relevant for 20 Years
Hard Disk Drives with HAMR Technology Set to Arrive in 2018
Market Views: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
91 Comments
View All Comments
drothgery - Saturday, July 9, 2016 - link
It's complicated. There's a minimum cost to build any mechanical hard drive, and the cheapest possible flash storage device is cheaper than that. That's why you don't see HDDs in any applications that need less than 128 GB or so anymore. It's just that the marginal cost of additional capacity is lower with hard drives (at least, until you start figuring in complex TCO arguments for data centers with very large amounts of storage).zodiacfml - Sunday, July 10, 2016 - link
It is almost irrelevant due to economies of scale. Right now, HDD are still comfortable with their scale right now. They have to be scared as it might drop non-linear in a few years; their drives will become more expensive that they will have to produce fewer, larger, archival drives.AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, July 10, 2016 - link
"almost irrelevant"? HDD's entire play is cost/GB, and there's reason to believe they cost MORE below some capacity."economy of scale" - you mean volume? Samsung already ships >10B memory chips per year, far more than Seagate units.
Danvelopment - Sunday, July 10, 2016 - link
Hard drives will remain as long as price/GB stays well ahead of solid state.Seeing as manufacturers have been unwilling to maintain that for the last 4 years, all I can see is a death spiral.
I bought 3x 2TB HDDs in 2012 for $99NZD each. The current cheapest 2TB HDD is $115. And the cheapest HDD or GB is a 3TB at $156 (slightly more/GB).
Fark HDD manufacturers. They can't win on performance or reliability against Samsung SSDs, all they can do is win on price but that gap has shrunk so much in four years I don't hold much hope for them without a drastic move. SSDs don't have to reach the same price point to take over, they just need to be close enough when accounting for the performance gap.
It also doesn't help that they've already lost the density crown and in a much smaller form factor.
Bobs_Your_Uncle - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Just now (7/12/16 @ 19:17EST) heard on The Nightly Business Report (PBS) that Seagate:- announced earnings that exceeded analyst expectations
- raised their projected income guidance
- experienced their "best day ever" in the markets (measurement metrics not disclosed)
... oh yeah ...
and Seagate announced that they're eliminating 6,000 jobs ...
The future is certainly looking rosy ... I guess ...
neatfeatguy - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I hear Seagate is looking to close out a major branch location nearing the end of the year or start of Q1 2017. Location in Shakopee, MN or a China branch (sorry, I didn't get what location in China.....rumor is pointing to MN location so far and as early as start of December has been hinted).Makes you wonder how well things can really be going for them - unless this is a restructure to help them stay viable in the every fast changing world of storage technology.
truemore - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
So I was having a meeting with one of the large corporate storage providers asking when they thought the "mass change" would happen from HHD to SSD for corporate storage.Interestingly even their technology people were surprised, but at the enterprise level the inflection point happened this year for primary storage devices. Given much better TCO over time and vast performance improvement with SSDs they have better short and long term ROI due to a better than expected 40% decrease in price per TB in the past 12 months and the large jump in maximum enterprise SSD size.
According to their people they are pushing all customers as fast as possible to SSD for all hot, and most warm storage. For them it makes perfect sense since they have very few drives break, arrays can easily be upgraded lowering the number of RFPs per $ sold and the performance increase for the customers is frankly amazing in the enterprise compute environment.
I wonder how this shift will affect us on the bottom, since large storage providers suck a large portion of the overall storage market. They may be the 600 gorilla that forces the market to make a quick move off of HDDs,
I would also be curious how the better performance and longer life span of SSDs will hurt SSD/HHD producers over the long haul since there will be much fewer sales over the long term.
Gothmoth - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
what i want from HDD´s is REABILITY, REABILITY, REABILITY.it can´t be that 10+% o harddrives from seagate die on me in the first 6-8 month.
i have a small renderfarm at home and 8 sytems with 2-4 harddrives each.
infant mortality of HDD´s is a real problem. and overall REABILITY seems to be getting worse.
Gothmoth - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
sorry i meant RELIABILITY... :-)profquatermass - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
Oh the Irony......