Seagate is pleased to introduce the Limited Edition The Last of Us Part II Officially Licensed Seagate 2 TB Game Drive, arriving alongside the game's launch on PlayStation 4 (PS4 ) and PlayStation 4 Pro (PS4 Pro). Seagate's latest addition to its popular line of storage for gamers offers an expansive 2 TB of storage, and celebrates the release of The Last of Us Part II with a laser-etched design that features Ellie's distinct tattoo. Players can download The Last of Us Part II, store the full game on this drive, and quickly start playing.

Optimized for PS4 and PS4 Pro consoles and offering seamless installation, Seagate's latest special edition Game Drive is small and lightweight enough to slip into a pocket. It does not need a separate power adapter and can store more than 50 downloaded games for playing on the go.

We're all counting down the days till we rejoin Ellie in her journey next month, and today, we are thrilled to announce the Limited Edition The Last of Us Part II PlayStation 4 Pro bundle, which will launch alongside the game on June 19, 2020. This special bundle features a fully customized matte finish PS4 Pro console engraved with Ellie's tattoo design, a Limited Edition DualShock 4 Wireless Controller, a physical copy of The Last of Us Part II game, as well as a code to redeem digital content such as The Last of Us Part II PS4 dynamic theme, avatars, and more. This limited edition bundle will be available across the U.S. and Canada for $399.99 USD (MSRP) / $499.99 CAD (MSRP).

The Limited Edition DualShock 4 Wireless Controller also will be available as a standalone for $64.99 USD (MSRP) / $74.99 CAD (MSRP). Presented in a Steel Black matte finish with white detailing and PlayStation shapes, this Limited Edition wireless controller features Ellie's iconic fern tattoo engraved on the lower right hand side and The Last of Us Part II logo on the touchpad.

As of March 31, 2020, Backblaze had 132,339 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,380 boot drives and 129,959 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. In addition, near the end of the post, we review a few 2019 predictions we posed a year ago. As always, we look forward to your comments.
Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2020

At the end of Q1 2020, Backblaze was using 129,959 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 129,764 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2020.

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) today reported financial results for its fiscal third quarter ended April 3, 2020. "Seagate executed very well in the third quarter while navigating the unprecedented challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our teams worked tirelessly to safeguard the health of their colleagues, support customer demand, and execute our product roadmap. In this challenging environment, we achieved strong financial performance, delivering revenue and non-GAAP EPS that were above our guidance midpoint and continuing to generate solid free cash flow," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

"Our results demonstrate the resilience of our business model, which combined with our strong balance sheet and liquidity offer stability to manage through this uncertain environment. Over the long-term, we believe the strength of our technology innovation and product portfolio position Seagate well to capitalize on secular demand for mass capacity storage as well as the growing necessity for cost effective data management solutions driven by the transition to IT 4.0."

Seagate has partnered with Cyberpunk and Xbox to release the Cyberpunk 2077 Special Edition Game Drive, this drive can complete your Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox gaming setup. Seagate joins Microsoft and SteelSeries in launching limited edition Cyberpunk 2077 themed products originally intended to coincide with the games launch which has now been delayed.

The drive features front and back styling with the iconic Cyberpunk gray and yellow gunmetal color scheme, very similar to the new Xbox One limited edition decal. The drive comes in 2 and 5 TB sizes for $90/$150 respectively, this pricing is inline with Seagates non-branded Xbox Game Drive lineup and should be available to purchase in early June from Costco, Amazon, PC Mall, Newegg, Fry's Electronics, and Adorama Camera.

Earlier this week, Western Digital was in the line of fire when it emerged that several of its WD Red family of "NAS-optimized" hard drives allegedly employ some form of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a physical-layer data writing technique that maximizes density at a heavy cost of random write performance that effectively makes the HDDs unfit for use in RAID volumes, and in turn most NAS applications that commonly employ RAID and encourage end-users to build RAID volumes for data redundancy. A new report by Blocks & Files finds that the issue is more widespread than previously thought, and that even Seagate employs it without disclosure on certain models.

Several of Seagate's higher capacity Barracuda desktop internal hard drives use SMR without disclosing it in their data-sheets. These include the 8 TB ST8000DM004, and 5 TB ST5000DM000. Both these drives are sold under the Barracuda Compute brand, which markets "home servers, entry-level DAS, and desktop computers" among its use-cases. Seagate does market its Archive and Exos lines of HDDs are employing SMR, but mention of the technique is buried in their data-sheets, and not prominently in product marketing or packaging. Archive and Exos are targeted at bulk cold storage setups where capacity is more important than performance. Meanwhile, Toshiba has confirmed that its Desktop HDDs too employ SMR. The company's MQ04 2.5-inch and DT02 3.5-inch HDDs employ "managed SMR" (i.e. use conventional recording and switch to SMR as the platters are running out of space).

Western Digital launched the WD Red line of hard drives and solid state drives specifically for NAS applications. The rigors of NAS involves not just near 24x7 uptime, but also the ability to work in RAID volumes, as most NAS servers ease the process for end users to set up RAID volumes for data redundancy. Data Storage-focused tech publication Blocks & Files alleges that some WD Red HDDs are shipping with shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a physical-layer data recording technique that makes the drive unfit for RAID, and in turn unfit for most serious NAS setups.

SMR is a recording technique that aims to achieve higher data density per platter, by partially overlapping tracks, by taking advantage of write tracks being wider than read tracks. Think of it as trying to cram a little more than one line of text per ruling, in a ruled notepad. The biggest trade-off with cramming in more data using SMR is a heavy loss in random write performance. The controversy of Western Digital shipping SMR WD Red drives came to light when Alan Brown, a network administrator with the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, noticed that a brand new WD Red HDD kept getting kicked out of RAID arrays during resilvering (rebalancing of data with the addition of a new disk to an existing RAID array).

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in data solutions, today announced the latest in high-performance solutions for multi-user NAS environments, adding to their award-winning IronWolf SSD product line. Seagate's IronWolf 510 is an M.2 NVMe SSD with caching speeds of up to 3 GB/s for NVMe-compatible systems and is ideal for creative pros and business NAS needing 24x7 multi-user storage that is cache enabled.

The IronWolf 510 SSD meets leading top NAS manufacturer requirements of one drive write per day (DWPD), allowing multi-user NAS environments to do more with their data with lasting performance. The IronWolf 510 SSD is reliable with 1.8 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF) in a PCIe form factor, two years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, and a five-year limited warranty. IronWolf Health Management helps analyze drive health and will soon be available on compatible NAS systems.

Seagate had plenty of things to show off at their CES booth, however, some things specially stuck out, like the Lyve Drive Mobile system. Developed to address the need for data movement between different endpoints, the Lyve Drive system comes in a few flavors. First in the line is a Lyve Drive Cards and Card Reader solution, which offers 1 TB CFexpress cards on the go, and a portable reader for them to read the data on the spot. Next up is the Lyve Drive Shutte which resembles an autonomous data storage and data transport solution that offers capacities of up to 16 TB of HDD or SSD storage.

Another Part of the Lyve Drive ecosystem is a Lyve Drive Mobile Array, which offers a sealed and ruggedized solution for carrying up to 6 of Seagate's 18 TB Exos HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) hard drives for a total capacity of 108 TB. Next in the lineup is the Lyve Drive Modular Array - a 4-bay flexible solution that offers various configurations for business, so their deployment strategy of these devices varies. It uses Seagate's MACH.2 multi-actuator technology that transfers the data concurrently. Last but not least is a Lyve Drive Rackmount Reciver which is a 4U rackmount hub that allows for direct connection of Lyve Drive arrays into the data center, without a need to reconnect any of the data center networking specially for storage transfer.

TechPowerUp and Seagate brought you the IronWolf Black Friday Giveaway, throwing three of Seagate's finest pieces of consumer storage up for grabs. The IronWolf series from Seagate represent durable internal HDDs and SSDs for NAS, DAS, NVR, and other high-uptime client applications. Among the prizes are the 14 TB IronWolf internal SATA HDD, and 480 GB IronWolf 110 high-endurance SSD. Without further ado, the winners:

• Neil from The Philippines, wins a 14 TB IronWolf SATA HDD and 480 GB IronWolf 110 SATA SSD (one of each)
• Lisa from Virginia, USA, wins a 480 GB IronWolf 110 SATA SSD

A huge Congratulations to you two! TechPowerUp and Seagate will return with more such interesting Giveaways!

Update Dec 17th: Unfortunately Lisa never responded to us to claim her prize, so we randomly picked another lucky winner: Frank from Washington, US.

TechPowerUp and Seagate partner to bring you the IronWolf Black Friday Giveaway. The IronWolf line of storage solutions from Seagate are targeted at NAS, DAS, and other high-uptime, quasi-enterprise environments, spanning both HDDs and SSDs. Two lucky winners stand to bring home IronWolf gear. The first lucky winner receives a 14 TB IronWolf internal SATA HDD and an IronWolf 110 SSD 480 GB (one of each). The second lucky winner gets an IronWolf 110 SSD 480 GB. The Giveaway is open worldwide (wherever legal), till December 4th. Do check out great Black Friday deals on Seagate IronWolf storage products at your favorite retailer.

For more details, and to participate, visit this page.

Seagate Technology, a world leader in data solutions, today added two new high-performance solutions to its industry-leading line of storage for gamers. The Seagate FireCuda 520 PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD and the FireCuda Gaming Dock featuring 4 TB of HDD storage capacity and an NVMe M.2 expansion slot for an optional ultra-fast SSD upgrade.

Built to deliver the intense speeds needed for the rigor of modern gaming, the FireCuda 520 SSD is the company's fastest solid-state drive and offers plug-and-play compatibility with all PCIe Gen4 motherboards. For laptop PC gamers looking for flexibility, the FireCuda Gaming Dock is an elite 4 TB HDD storage hub with an NVMe M.2 expansion slot for optional SSD upgrade that connects peripherals via a Thunderbolt 3 and offers a slick industrial design with LED illumination pushing your rig over the top.

Seagate announced its roadmap for the coming years, and the company is naturally fighting tooth and nail for the relevance of HDD technology in the market. While the benefits of SSDs are already well understood by the entire industry, in some scenarios, it makes more sense to make use of high-density HDDs - particularly where deployment space is at a premium, and in scenarios where seek times for information stored on the media aren't all that important. This is why the company is aggressively pushing its new HAMR technology as a way to increase areal density on traditional platter-based media.

Plans to achieve 18 TB and 20 TB density HDDs in the first semester of 2020 seem to be well within reason, considering the company has recently shipped 16 TB HDDs. These HDD solutions will still make use of older technologies such as CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), for the 18 TB drives) and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) for their 20 TB 2020 products. The company will later make use of their proprietary HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology in order to upgrade their 20 TB, and 20 TB+ HDDs with higher performance (and density) than can be achieved with the tried and true SMR. When it comes to performance improvements, a latent disadvantage in HDDs compared to solid state solutions, the company will eventually deploy HDDs which make use of two sets of read/write heads instead of a single one.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products, including network attached storage and direct attached storage, is announcing today the availability of its new storage solution for SME, professional and power users. The TerraMaster F5-422 features a powerful hardware configuration to bring excellent performance where it matters; for professionals and SME applications looking to maximize shared storage. Thanks to the introduction of the 10 GbE LAN, the TerraMaster F5-422 can deliver data faster. Backed by TerraMaster's latest TOS operating system, the F5-422 delivers an excellent feature set to any use. The TerraMaster F5-422 has an MSRP of $599.99 USD.

The F5-422 features a quad-core 1.50 GHz Intel CPU which has a boost clock of 2.30 GHz. 4 GB of DDR3 memory compliment the processor as well as built-in AES NI encryption. For maximum accessibility, the F5-422 features a 10 GbE port as well as 2x 1 GbE LAN, the F5-422 can be made available to a wide number of users without the bottleneck of traditional single LAN connections. The TerraMaster F5-422 is rated up to 670 MB/s write speeds and 650 MB/s read performance on a 5x 6 TB Seagate IronWolf RAID5 setup. Perfect for professionals like video editors working with 4K videos or others that need rapid access to large data with strict speed requirements.

TechPowerUp and Seagate brought you the IronWolf 110 NAS SSD Giveaway over July. One lucky winner stood a chance to bag a Seagate IronWolf 110 240 GB SSD. The IronWolf 110 is specially designed for the rigors of NAS, which involve high uptime, the need for high endurance, and the ability to play along well in RAID volumes. You can read all about this drive in our comprehensive review. Seagate also bolstered it with NAS-specific data backup and recovery software. The entries are in, and we have our Winner:

• Danni from Denmark

Huge Congratulations to Danni! TechPowerUp will return with more such interesting Giveaways.

TechPowerUp and Seagate bring you a chance to win the new IronWolf 110 240 GB NAS solid-state drive. Seagate designed the IronWolf 110 line of SATA SSDs to deal with the rigors of the high-uptime NAS environment. Our comprehensive review of the drive also finds the drive to offer excellent sustained write performance, extremely high sequential speeds for a SATA drive, a high endurance rating, and additional NAS-specific software and data-recovery tools. We are giving away a IronWolf 110 240 GB drive to one lucky winner. To participate, all you need to do is provide the correct answer to the question, and fill a short form to help us get back to you if you've won. The Giveaway is open worldwide, wherever legal. Good Luck!

For more details and to participate, visit this page.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in data storage solutions, today announced it has been actively shipping 16TB helium-based enterprise drives as part of the Exos X16 family, delivering high performance and record capacity for hyperscale data centers to efficiently and cost-effectively manage ever-increasing amounts of data. The company also updated the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive lines with new 16TB capacity models.

The need for hyperscale, cloud, and NAS storage solutions continues to rise to unprecedented levels. In fact, a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate predicts that the Global Datasphere - the amount of data created, captured or replicated across the globe - will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. Seagate's Exos X16 hard drive delivers the highest storage density available with the field-proven reliability and continuous high performance to support a broad range of workload requirements and high-availability use cases.

The trade ban imposed on Chinese tech giant Huawei by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and ratified through an Executive Order by President Donald Trump, is cutting both ways. Not only are U.S. entities banned from importing products and services from Huawei, but also engaging in trade with them (i.e. selling to them). U.S. tech firms stare at a $11 billion revenue loss by early estimates. Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs compiled a list of companies impacted by the ban, and the extent of their revenue loss. It turns out that AMD isn't a small player, and in fact, stands to lose more revenue in absolute terms than even Microsoft. It earns RMB 268 million (USD $38.79 million) from Huawei, compared to Microsoft's RMB 198 million ($28.66 million). Intel's revenue loss is a little over double that of AMD at RMB 589 million ($84 million), despite its market-share dominance.

That's not all, AMD's exposure is higher than that of Intel, since sales to Huawei make up a greater percentage of AMD's revenues than it does Intel's. AMD exports not just client-segment products such as Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics, but possibly also EPYC enterprise processors for Huawei's server and SMB product businesses. NVIDIA is affected to a far lesser extent than Intel, AMD, and Microsoft. Qualcomm-Broadcom take the biggest hit in absolute revenue terms at RMB 3.5 billion ($508 million), even if their exposure isn't the highest. The duo export SoCs and cellular modems to Huawei, both as bare-metal and licenses. Storage hardware makers aren't far behind, with the likes of Micron, Seagate, and Western Digital taking big hits. Micron exports DRAM and SSDs, while Seagate and WDC export hard drives.

With solid-state drives (SSDs) entering value and mainstream price segments, and the transition in consumers' data-storage behavior from local storage to the cloud, there is expected to be a dramatic fall in shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) in 2019. Japanese company Nidec, which manufactures nearly 85% of all DC motors for use in HDDs across the industry, estimates a nearly 50 percent drop in HDD shipments for 2019. Since these motors are specifically designed for use in HDDs, it is directly proportional to new HDD shipments, thus presenting a reliable outlook of the HDD industry itself. The DC motor inside HDDs is a non user-replaceable component as detaching it involves opening the seal of the disk chamber, thereby contaminating it.

In 2010, Nidec shipped nearly 650 million motors, which dropped significantly down to 375 million motors in 2018, indicating the sharp decline in the HDD industry. While Nidec will ship as few as 290 million motors in 2019, it estimates shipments of HDDs to go down by nearly 50 percent year-over-year (YoY). Data centers are swallowing up large volumes of high-capacity (>10 TB) HDDs for warm- and cold-storage even as SSDs and DRAM are sought for hot-storage. The client-segment, however, is now firmly captivated with SSDs, with even mainstream laptops packing SSDs. Prominent HDD manufacturers Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba, have each invested heavily in building up SSD product lines, and specializing their HDD portfolio for enterprise and quasi-enterprise (eg: NAS, NVR, high-uptime client) markets.

As of March 31, 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across three data centers. Of that number, there were 1,913 boot drives and 104,325 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way.

Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2019
At the end of Q1 2019, Backblaze was using 104,325 hard drives to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 104,130 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2019.

Today at the 2019 NAB Show, LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX), announced two new storage solutions for creative professionals and prosumers. The new LaCie Rugged RAID Shuttle and LaCie 2big RAID build on the brand's record of efficient preservation of high-value, high-resolution digital imagery through the capture, edit, distribution, and archiving workflow

Digital transformation in the media and entertainment industry has led to rapid data growth. In fact, according to a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate, the media and entertainment (M&E) datasphere - the amount of data created, captured or replicated across the globe - is expected to grow at a 25% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2025.

Seagate at CES 2019 unveiled its first NAS-grade solid state drives, under the Ironwolf 110 series. A "NAS-grade" HDD/SSD is typically that which has its durability or endurance rated halfway between client- and enterprise segments. The Ironwolf 110 series boasts of 1 DWPD endurance, and comes in capacities of up to 3.84 TB. Backing these endurance chops is a 5-year warranty. The drive is also designed keeping in mind the rigors of 24x7 operation and RAID environments. Although built in the 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor with SATA 6 Gbps interface, Seagate understands that a lot of home/SOHO NAS devices only feature 3.5-inch caddies. It's likely that these drives will include a simple accessory that lets you use them with 3.5-inch trays.

Available in capacities of 3.84 TB, 1.92 TB, 960 GB, 480 GB, and 240 GB, the Ironwolf 110 incorporates 3D TLC NAND flash memory. All variants are capable of up to 560 MB/s sequential reads, and barring the 240 GB variant that writes at up to 345 MB/s, all variants offer up to 535 MB/s sequential writes. The 4K random access read performance ranges between 85,000 to 90,000 IOPS for the 960 GB thru 3.84 TB variants, and between 55,000 to 75,000 IOPS for the 240 thru 480 GB ones.

Seagate eyes itself a slice of the M.2 NVMe SSD market targeting DIY gaming PC builders in 2019. It's come up with slightly more imaginative branding than arch-rival WD, with the FireCuda 510 and BarraCuda 510. The FireCuda 510 is the company's flagship drive, built in the M.2-2280 form-factor, and featuring a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface. This drive offers stellar sequential transfer speeds of up to 3450 MB/s reads, with up to 3200 MB/s writes, and random-access numbers of up to 620,000 IOPS reads, with up to 600,000 IOPS writes; which upstages even existing segment leaders such as Samsung 970 PRO and WD Black 3D, at least on paper. It comes in capacities up to 2 TB, and is backed by 5-year warranties.

The BarraCuda 510 isn't far behind its sibling, and despite its deceptive "green" branding, isn't a drab M.2-SATA drive. It's out to compete with the likes of the Samsung 970 EVO. With speeds of up to 3400 MB/s sequential reads, up to 3100 MB/s sequential writes, and a 5-year warranty, this drive debuts in just two models initially - 256 GB and 512 GB, with more models in the pipeline. Retail availability is expected to be in March, 2019 and pricing is not yet confirmed.

Seagate Technology plc., a world leader in data solutions, today announced an exciting extension of its portfolio with several new models, including new solid state drive offerings at CES 2019. From gung-ho gamers to Instagram gurus, photo-collecting parents, or visionary creatives, Seagate offers the data storage solutions that empower users to live their best digital lives in today's fast-changing data-heavy landscape.

Today, consumers have more ways than ever to consume content, driving the need to create, distribute and manage data efficiently. According to a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate, five billion consumers are currently interacting with data every single day. By 2025, that number will jump to six billion, or 75 percent of the world's population. Each of those six billion people will have at least one data interaction every 18 seconds, bumping the amount of data created worldwide to 175 zettabytes by 2025. Consumers increasingly need reliable ways to collect, protect, manage and access a good portion of that data, and Seagate's latest products - including the cutting-edge LaCie Mobile Drive, LaCie Mobile SSD, Seagate Backup Plus HDDs, FireCuda 510 and BarraCuda 510 internal SSDs, and IronWolf 110 NAS SSD - are designed to fit a variety of data storage needs and digital lifestyles.

Razer, the world's leading lifestyle brand for gamers, today announces its plan for a long-term lease of a new location for its Southeast Asia headquarters based in the technology and media hub of Singapore. The Company anticipates moving into the new facility in 2020. Razer has been on a strong growth trajectory and delivered a stellar year-on-year growth of 39% in revenues and 46% in gross profit in the first half of 2018. Razer's plans for its new headquarters highlight the Company's growth plans in the esports and gaming industries as the total addressable market (TAM) for gamers is expected to grow from 2.35 billion in 2018 to 2.76 billion in 2021, according to Newzoo Global Games Market Report.

The strategic location of the new Razer headquarters in Singapore also rides on the growing traction of the Services business across Southeast Asia. Razer has proven out to be the preferred monetization platform for gaming and content companies seeking to expand their global presence especially in the fast-growing Southeast Asia market, as evidenced by the recent Razer Gold partnerships with PUBG MOBILE, Nexon America and Webzen. Along with Razer Silver loyalty rewards system, Razer Gold empowers gamers to get the most out of their games and gaming lifestyle.