QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched the 2-bay TS-233 NAS suitable for home/office environments. With a sleek design and quiet fan, the TS-233 provides a cost-effective centralized storage, backup, file sharing, and multimedia solution that features rich NAS applications for greater productivity and boundless entertainment.

The TS-233 features an ARM Cortex A55 quad-core processor with integrated 2 GB memory. It can be used with 3.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s SSDs and supports AES-NI encryption acceleration, providing a secure, high-speed backup/restore, file access and sharing experience. With a built-in NPU (Neural network Processing Unit) processor, the TS-233 also boosts QNAP AI Core (the AI-powered engine for image recognition) performance for high-speed face and object recognition.

AI-enabled video imaging and analytics systems require support for heavy workloads that process and analyze multiple streams and thousands of hours of video data. Today during the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas, Nev., Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, launched the new SkyHawk AI 20 TB hard disk drive (HDD). The mass-capacity HDD adds to the company's leading line of video imaging and analytics (VIA) devices.

Purposely designed for network video recorders (NVRs) enabled with AI for edge security applications, Seagate's SkyHawk AI 20 TB HDD intelligently adapts to the scale of the users' AI environment, supporting up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams. With this capability to support scalable AI workloads, SkyHawk AI meets the growing needs of advanced VIA systems to analyze and record video footage while simultaneously supporting GPU analytics.

As developers create compelling PlayStation 5 (PS5 ) and PlayStation 4 (PS4 ) games, players are building up their game libraries and eagerly searching for high-capacity add-on storage options. Today, Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) expands its storage capacity for PS4 and PS5 consoles with our officially licensed external Game Drive—featuring 2 TB and 4 TB capacities. Leveling up the company's line of PlayStation storage for gamers, the new external hard drive offers the ultimate game vault for PS5 and PS4 storage and delivers the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.

Specifically designed and optimized with firmware to work with PS4 and PS5 consoles, these drives are lightweight and offer plug-and-play installation in under two minutes with no tools required—so players can jump into action. Connected and powered with high-speed USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 3.0), Seagate's add-on storage options for PlayStation consoles do not need a separate power cord, making it easy for players to play from anywhere.

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation announced HDD shipment unit and Exabyte grew 4% and 61%, respectively in 2021. The company shipped 54.68 million units equaling 187.24 Exabytes for the year. Nearline, Mission Critical, Desktop/CE segments posted higher unit and Exabyte results for the year with Nearline HDDs leading all applications with units surging 73% and Exabytes skyrocketing 114%. Toshiba set a new shipment record for Nearline HDDs in 4CQ21, as units grew to 2.90 million units totaling 33.93 Exabytes for the quarter and was up over 94% from a year ago. Toshiba led the industry in Y-Y growth in eight categories for the year, and holds a unique position as an HDD company posting unit growth in 2021.

"Toshiba continues to execute in the Nearline space, and this is reflected in the company's new Nearline unit shipment record in 4CQ21," stated Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "Toshiba's cutting-edge technology such as FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should further their competitiveness in the Nearline HDD market."

Toshiba Corporation held an investor relations event in Tokyo, Japan. During Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation's presentation, Mr. Hiroyuki Sato, President & CEO of TDSC, unveiled a descriptive roadmap of Toshiba's next-generation Nearline HDDs. Data generation continues to grow at a double digit rates every year, and demand from cloud companies to store the burgeoning data is driving the need for higher capacity HDDs. To meet this surging demand, Toshiba plans to leverage its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), and Disk Stacking technology to lift Nearline HDD capacities to 30 TB by FY2023, and greater capacities beyond.

"Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers' needs," said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President, Engineering & Product Marketing. "Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces TCO (total cost of ownership) of our Nearline HDDs."

Backblaze, a cloud storage provider has recently released their latest annual report on the performance of their 202,759 hard disks in operation. The company operates drives of various capacities and ages from Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and WDC monitoring each models annualized failure rate (AFR). The latest report shows that the AFR for all drives in operation rose to 1.01% in 2021 up from 0.93% in 2020 but significantly below the 1.83% reported in 2019. The larger capacity newer drives are primarily responsible for this figure with them accounting for 69% of total active drives but only 57% of drive failures.

The most reliable drive operated by Backblaze remains the 6 TB Seagate ST6000DX000 with an AFR of just 0.11% while having an average age of 80.4 months. The least reliable drive is also from Seagate with the 14 TB ST14000NM0138 having an AFR of 4.66% in Q4 2021 down from 6.29% in Q3 2021. While these statistics cannot be used to reliably judge the quality of drives from any particular manufacturer they serve as a good reference for general trends in hard drive reliability.

Toshiba America Electronic Components today announced a new Nearline HDD shipment record of 2.89 million units for the December 2021 quarter. The new Nearline unit record reflected year over year growth of 80% and topped the previous best quarter by 4% set earlier in the year. Nearline Exabytes in the quarter grew sequentially to 33.81 and was up over 94% from a year ago.

"Toshiba continues to execute in the Nearline space, and this is reflected in the company's new Nearline unit shipment record in 4CQ21," stated Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "Toshiba's cutting-edge technology such as FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should further their competitiveness in the Nearline HDD market."

Infortrend Technology, Inc. (TWSE: 2495), the industry-leading enterprise storage provider, satisfies requirements of high throughput and fast response time for high-performance computing (HPC), media post-production, and medical PACS applications ­— with EonStor CS NVMe SSD storage delivering 13 GB/s throughput in a 3-node cluster, and performance linearly increases in a scale-out mode.

Today's HPC applications perform computationally intensive operations with billions of files across multiple resources of different nature at PB scale. Storage for HPC, therefore, must be able to simultaneously support multiple random and sequential IO workloads of different sizes. Otherwise, it can extensively delay the HPC application output and the company's success. EonStor CS NVMe SSD storage, CS 4014U, effectively eliminates these concerns and guarantees fast response time, satisfying various types of IO profiles.\

DeepCool, a global brand in designing and manufacturing high-performance computer components for enthusiasts worldwide, announces the CK SERIES Mid-Tower Cases, which consists the CK500, CK500WH, CK560 and CK560WH. Available in black and white, all cases deliver a balance of airflow, silent performance and exceptional cooling for the modern-day builder.

The CK SERIES deliver a no-nonsense approach to a clean, sleek computer chassis design. For Minimalist Builders who appreciate the CK500 and CK500WH minimal solid front panel can be rest assured that airflow performance is not hindered thanks to enlarged ventilation outlets throughout the front, top, and rear panels for additional air movement. For Builders that insist for even more airflow, the CK560 and CK560WH feature a unique cross-hair patterned steel front panel. All cases offer a clean aesthetic and fits a modern day look while being feature-packed for additional hardware expansion and upgrades.

Toshiba Group has announced the world's first demonstration of HDD recording performance improvement with Microwave Assisted Switching-Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAS-MAMR), a next-generation magnetic recording technology. The demonstration confirms that the technology delivers substantial storage capacity gains, and Toshiba now aims to realize early commercialization of nearline HDDs with capacities exceeding 30 TB.

Toshiba is placing considerable R&D effort on MAMR, a breakthrough technology that boosts HDD recording density. In 2021, the company started shipment of 18 TB HDDs that apply Flux Control MAMR (FC-MAMR ), which uses spin torque oscillators to assist recording. MAS-MAMR is expected to improve recording density beyond that of FC-MAMR by locally exposing microwave to -recording media. However, this was not shown to be possible in practice until the recent demonstration.

Toshiba announces the MN09, a massive capacity 18 TB addition to its NAS HDD line-up. High growth in data creation is driving demand for higher storage capacities, and work-from-home customers need fast access to data and the ability to archive and share data in private cloud environments. The 18 TB MN09 delivers greater storage capacity and power efficiency to meet the growing needs of storage customers.

MN09 is a 9-disk helium-sealed conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drive that leverages Toshiba's new innovative Flux Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR ) technology. FC-MAMR advances CMR capacity to 18 TB and delivers increased density per platter over previous designs. The MN09 is the 3rd generation to use Toshiba's pioneering 9-disk helium-sealed mechanical design.

Marvell today announced that it will ship its 5 billionth hard disk drive (HDD) controller next month, marking a significant milestone in the company's 25 years of delivering data storage solutions. This achievement is a testament to the longevity of Marvell's HDD business and underscores the company's ongoing commitment to investing in and developing cutting-edge Bravera HDD products and IP to address the ever-increasing need for greater storage capacity.

The ongoing digital transformation is driving the adoption of cloud services, digital payments, artificial intelligence, and 5G, requiring higher capacity data storage. As a result, cloud data centers are looking for HDD storage to meet the growing zettabyte demand. Marvell's comprehensive suite of Bravera HDD controller and preamplifier solutions leverage the company's IP and process excellence including over 1,500 HDD-related patents and 18 generations of Read Channel IP. With its advanced architecture built on best-in-class areal density, data reliability, and power consumption, Marvell is enabling the growth of mass storage applications from the edge to the cloud.

"Reaching our 5 billionth HDD controller shipment is a huge accomplishment and we'd like to take a moment to thank our longstanding customers and partners for their trust and collaboration over many years. We celebrate this milestone alongside them," said Dan Christman, Executive Vice President, Storage Group at Marvell. "We remain deeply committed to the HDD market and will continue to invest in leading-edge Bravera technologies that advance the next generation of cloud data storage infrastructure."

Data drives today's most innovative technology and business breakthroughs. Maximizing the value of an organization's data is dependent on the ability to store, access, and activate as much data as possible. Today, Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, launched the new Exos X20 20 TB and IronWolf Pro 20 TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based hard disk drives (HDDs), increasing mass-capacity data storage capabilities.

Seagate's Exos X20 enterprise HDD is designed for maximum storage capacity and the highest rack-space efficiency. Built with cloud storage in mind, the 20 TB Exos X20 delivers performance for hyperscale data centers and massive scale-out applications. With low latency of 4.16 ms and repeatable response times, Exos X20 provides enhanced caching that performs up to three times better than solutions that only utilize read or write caching. Exos X20 also delivers an increased sustained data rate (SDR) of up to 285 MB/s.

Back in June, NVM Express, Inc announced the NVMe 2.0 specification, which included support for mechanical drives, also known as hard disk drives. Seagate has now demoed the first implementation of NVMe 2.0 on a HDD and is targeting market availability sometime in 2024. You might wonder why anyone would want an NVMe equipped hard drive and the short answer is that it's intended for the server space.

One of the key reasons that Seagate is even considering this, is because of its multi-actuator drives, which the company is expecting to surpass the interface speed of 12 Gbps SAS in the future. In addition to this, it makes sense having a single storage interface on servers, which allows for a mixed storage drive environment, where some drive bays can be fitted with SSDs and others with NVMe based hard drives. Seagate is planning to sample key customers with early drives in September 2022 and final drives will be backwards compatible with SATA and SAS.

Back-up and protect your data from out in the wild to back in the office with the new Armor A66 portable hard drive from Silicon Power (SP). It's the ultimate all-terrain drive that's rugged enough to shake-off drops, shocks, rains, and dust with ease. Meeting the MIL-STD 810G Method 516.6 Procedure IV drop test requirements, this drive is military-grade shockproof against accidental bumps and drops for worry-free handling.

On the outside, an all-around rubber bumper provides 360˚ protection to both absorb and soften the effects of any unfortunate mishaps.On the inside, an advanced suspension system effectively reduces impact force and increases shock-absorption to keep data from directly feeling these effects. IPX4-level water-resistance shields the drive from splashing water in any direction to fearlessly go out regardless of the weather forecast.

At the company's HDD Reimagine event today, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) introduced a new flash-enhanced drive architecture that breaks traditional boundaries of storage. Building on the company's unique ability to innovate with HDD and flash, the new storage architecture with OptiNAND technology optimizes and integrates HDDs with iNAND embedded flash drives. This gives customers - like hyperscale cloud, CSPs, enterprises, smart video surveillance partners, NAS suppliers and more - a solution to meet the exponential growth in data creation by delivering the capacity, performance and reliability needed to store vast amounts of data today and well into the future.

Leveraging industry-first technologies including triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal technology, the first products featuring the new drive architecture will deliver an unsurpassed 2.2 TB per platter, extending capacities gains on proven ePMR technology. Setting a new industry milestone, Western Digital has shipped samples of new nine-disk, 20 TB ePMR flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology to select customers.

The Chia coin, often dubbed Green Bitcoin, is a project that promised to be a green alternative to all of the previous attempts at creating a coin that can be mined. Using the Proof of Space (PoS) technique requires massive storage space and Chia plotting can destroy modern SSDs in a matter of weeks. However, the green disputes have been questioned widely, and the Chia coin is not considered so much of a green alternative anymore. From its peak of $1645, it has tumbled down by over 80% of that and it is now worth around $281 at the time of writing.

As these prices have declined a lot, miners are starting to look away from the coin and have started to resell their hardware. This massive SSD and HDD reselling has started to obtain new funds for miners to move to another alternative cryptocurrency. In the awe of this, some miners are rebranding their worn-out and used SSDs as brand new, and selling them in China advertising new conditions. As Chia plotting tends to destroy SSDs, it is only a matter of time before these "brand new" drives start failing. After China, we could see other markets flooded with these drives as well, so it is always best to be cautious with your purchase.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) today announced that for a second consecutive quarter, the company posted a 30+% Q-Q growth in Nearline HDD unit shipment and capacity shipped. Toshiba's Nearline HDD shipments and exabytes reached 2.79 million and 34.15 representing sequential growth of 32% and 33%, respectively. According to TRENDFOCUS' new report (SDAS: HDD Information Service CQ2 '21 Quarterly Update - Executive Summary August 5, 2021), Toshiba's four-quarter average unit and capacity shipped growth rates for Nearline HDDs led all companies at 35% and 46%, respectively. Additionally, Toshiba was the only company to post growth rates higher than the industry's four-quarter average.

"Demand for HDDs, specifically Nearline HDDs, have been on an upward trend due to strong cloud and OEM demand, while the initial launch of the Chia cryptocurrency fueled new incremental channel requirements. Toshiba's competitive Nearline HDD product line up is lifting the company to new records," stated John Chen, Vice President at TRENDFOCUS, Inc. "Moreover, Toshiba's FC-MAMR (Flux Control - Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology used in its 18 TB (MG-09) Nearline HDD product should provide a robust foundation to build upon for its next-generation products."

Seagate has recently announced during their latest earnings call that they are preparing to launch mass-market 20 TB PMR hard drives in H2 2021. Seagate already has several business-focused 20 TB HAMR drives which are available in limited quantities to select partners. These new 20 TB PMR drives will feature two-dimensional magnetic recording and are already sampling with customers. Seagate is also working on SMR 20 TB drives for Hyperscale systems with specialized software. Seagate hopes this growing lineup of 20 TB drives will help them address specific customer needs.

Seagate CEOWe expect to begin shipping 20 terabyte PMR drives in the second half of this calendar year.

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently published new forecasts for the worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) markets. While both markets were affected the COVID-19 pandemic, the outlook looks good as demand for storage remains strong in multiple areas. Worldwide HDD industry petabyte shipments are expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5% over the 2020-2025 forecast period and average capacity per drive is forecast to increase at a five-year CAGR of 25.5%.

"While the client HDD market continues a long-term secular decline due to rising SSD attach rates, the COVID-19 pandemic has over the near term increased the demand for certain types of HDDs, particularly mobile HDDs as well as capacity-optimized HDDs," said Edward Burns, research director, Hard Disk Drive and Storage Technologies at IDC. "And the demand for storage capacity continues to grow at a steady pace as the world creates and stores more and more data."

The demand for HDDs has increased significantly due to Chia cryptocurrency mining in recent times causing major shortages and increasing retail prices. Seagate and Western Digital are increasing the production of their high-capacity HDD models by increasing the utilization rate on existing production lines in an attempt to satisfy this demand. The companies have limited options to increase production in the short-term due to bulk contracts for 60% - 70% of total production and neither company plans to construct new factories in the immediate future. The total global storage capacity allocated to Chia mining has recently surpassed 20 Exabytes up from 1 Exabyte in April and doesn't show any signs of stopping. The shortages look set to continue with both companies happy to monitor the situation and take advantage of the increased demand before deciding on future expansion plans in the coming years.

HDD manufacturers have tirelessly worked to reinvent the spinning drive technology (and sometimes topology) with increased storage density capabilities (potentiated by the development of technologies such as HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording). Researchers with the Cambridge Graphene Centre have collaborated with the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore and the US to showcase how much life there might still exist in HDDs - if only graphene were to be used.

The research shows how a single graphene layer (researchers tested up to four layers) can be used as a replacement for multiple layers of carbon-based overcoats (COCs), which are deployed on platters to protect them from mechanical damages and corrosion. Current COC thickness stands at only 3 nm, but any existing space between platters presents a bottleneck to the number of platters (and thus storage density) that can be achieved in the HDD world. The researchers demonstrated that graphene enables a two-fold reduction in friction and provides better corrosion and wear protection than current state-of-the-art solutions. In fact, one single graphene layer reduces corrosion by 2.5 times. The researchers further demonstrated that graphene can still be deployed as protective layers in HAMR-totting HDDs - a feat that current carbon-based overcoats can't reproduce, as they fail at the high temperatures arising from the heat-assisted recording. Just one more feather on graphene's utility cap.

Empowering the world's essential data infrastructure, Western Digital Corp. today announced the expansion of the WD Purple family with the WD Purple Pro product line for a new generation of advanced AI-enabled recorders and backend servers.

The worldwide video surveillance camera market is estimated to grow to $44 billion by 2025, up from $23.6 billion in 2019, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). Emerging smart video architectures that capture, store and analyze massive amounts of video data, and perform heavy deep-learning video analytics, are putting an unprecedented level of stress on storage subsystems. The new WD Purple Pro line is designed to handle these workloads with optimized storage performance, capacity, workload capability and reliability for a myriad of devices, including AI-enabled network video recorders (NVRs), video analytics appliances, video analytics servers, storage arrays, and storage/server solutions, including those that perform deep-learning analytics.

Chia, the new crypto-currency that relies on storage as proof-of-work to obtain, rather than processing power, is already causing widespread failures of storage devices that have a finite write endurance, according a report by Chinese tech publication MyDrivers. We've detailed how Chia farming works in an older article. Farming it (i.e. participating in the network that keeps the crypto-currency running, in exchange for the currency itself), takes a toll on your storage device. NAND flash-based devices, such as SSDs and USB flash drives, can be re-written a finite number of times, described by manufacturers as "write endurance" and expressed as TBW (terabytes written), or DWPD (drive writes per day, a unit in which drive size is accounted for).

MyDrivers notes that Chia farmers in China are noticing that typical 256 GB SSDs barely last through 40 drive-write days, 80 days for 512 GB, and about 160 days for 1 TB. Endurance varies among the various SSD brands, and NAND flash type used. Since disk space, and not drive performance is paramount in farming Chia, and magnetic storage devices such as HDDs offer more re-writing, stocks of high-capacity HDDs, including those typically headed to the NVR and security surveilance markets, are being soaked up by Chia farmers.

In the initial days of SSDs, some 11-odd years ago, SSDs were considered unreliable. They'd randomly fail on you, causing irrecoverable data loss. Gaming desktop users usually installed an HDD to go with the SSD in their builds, so they could take regular whole-disk images of the SSD onto the HDD; Microsoft even added a disk imaging feature with Windows 7. Since then, SSDs have come a long way with reliability, are now backed with longer warranties than HDDs, and high endurance. Notebook vendors are increasingly opting for SSDs as the sole storage device in their thin-and-light products. A Backblaze study reveals an interesting finding: SSDs are 21 times more reliable than HDDs.

Backblaze is popular for conducting regular actionable studies on storage device reliability in the enterprise segment, particularly dissecting how each brand of HDD and SSD fares in terms of drive failures or average failure rates (AFR). In a study covering Q1 2021 (January 1 to March 31), Backblaze finds that the AFR of HDDs across brands, stands at 10.56%. In the same period, SSDs across brands lodged an AFR of a stunning 0.58%. In other words, roughly 1 in 10 HDDs failed, compared to roughly 1 in 200 SSDs. Things get interesting when Backblaze looks all the way back to 2013, when it started studying drive reliability.