Seagate Technology plc., a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), the leading Chinese language internet search provider, covering the fields of information technology, big data analysis and advanced storage system development and implementation.

The pact renews an existing agreement between the two firms signed in September 2014, under which Baidu would give priority to Seagate when selecting storage products and solutions, and Seagate would give advanced access to products, services and support to Baidu, as well as assign a dedicated team of engineers to the company.

The cooperation between the two parties builds on this, with Seagate providing double the amount of technical cooperation, and closer links to Baidu for its business needs. With regard to new products, Baidu will be at the forefront of Internet users in China implementing Seagate's new storage products, and also the two sides will jointly develop customized systems to meet Baidu business needs. In addition, the procurement model for both companies will be further upgraded to save costs for each side.

It appears that although MLC NAND-based SSDs have many advantages to HDD's from a physical-reliability point of view, the old spinning rust drives might still have one advantage over SSDs: A specially crafted write operation can't corrupt your data.

That's what a new report from Carnegie Mellon University, Seagate, and ETH Zürich is showing: That MLC-based SSD Drives are vulnerable to data-corrupting attacks as simple as a specially crafted write operation.

Drones are creating more content than ever before, and with the announcement of the Seagate DJI Fly Drive, managing that surge of data is about to get easier. The first data solution to come from Seagate and DJI's strategic partnership, Fly Drive will allow drone pilots to efficiently back up their photo and video content on location, thanks to its large storage capacity, integrated MicroSD card slot, quick transfer speeds and durable build. It also comes with a complimentary two-month subscription to Adobe Premiere Pro CC, part of Adobe Creative Cloud-placing the keys to creativity in the hands of drone enthusiasts everywhere.

NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the NVM Express specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus, today announced the results of its recent board elections. Elected to Promoter positions were Facebook, Micron, Microsoft, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Facebook and Toshiba are new to the Promoter level, and the others are incumbents. The election winners join existing Promoters Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Microsemi, NetApp and Oracle, whose current terms expire at the end of 2017.

Representatives from the 13 Promoter companies form the NVM Express, Inc. Board of Directors, which governs the organization, including setting strategic direction. All Contributor and Promoter member companies are eligible to run for Promoter positions, where there are elections each year for roughly half the positions.

"We're very pleased to welcome Toshiba and Facebook to the NVM Express, Inc. Board, to help shape the future direction of NVM Express technology and the organization," said Amber Huffman, NVM Express President. "In 2016, we marked major milestones, such as publishing the NVM Express over Fabrics specification. We look forward to publishing revision 1.3 in the first half of this year - with much more to come later in 2017."

Backblaze has just revealed their HDD failure rates statistics, with updates regarding 2016's Q4 and full-year analysis. These 2016 results join the company's statistics, which started being collected and collated in April 2013, to shed some light on the most - and least reliable - manufacturers. A total of 1,225 drives failed in 2016, which means the drive failure rate for 2016 was just 1.95 percent, a improving over the 2.47 percent that died in 2015 and miles below the 6.39 percent that hit the garbage bin in 2014.

Organizing 2016's failure rates by drive size, independent of manufacturer, we see that 3 TB hard drives are the most reliable (with 1,40% failure rates), with 5 TB hard drives being the least reliable (at a 2,22% failure rate). When we organize the drives by manufacturer, HGST, which powers 34% (24,545) of the total drives (71,939), claims the reliability crown, with a measly 0,60% failure rate, and WDC bringing up the rear on reliability terms, with an average 3,88% failure rate, while simultaneously being one of the least represented manufacturers, with only 1,626 HDDs being used from the manufacturer.

The woes for the trusty old HDD continue, as Seagate, one of the world's biggest players on the HDD manufacturing field, has confirmed they are closing up one of their largest plants. The factory, located in Suzhou, China, is one of the company's largest HDD production epicenters, and its closure will significantly reduce the company's HDD output - a step in the company's purported "optimizations" towards reducing their HDD production capabilities from 55-60 million HDDs per quarter to around 35-40 million. Production and demand's age-old feud are once again taking their toll, as demand for spindle-drive technology subsides on the wake of SSDs increased performance and consecutive price declines, with most laptops now shipping with either SSD-based storage or cheaper, yet less power-hungry, eMMC solutions.

Seagate has announced that the company is launching its Duet external hard drive, which would be, in all regards, a run-of-the-mill external hard drive (based on the company's Backup Plus Portable Drive), were it not for the fact that it runs tailored software that syncs its contents with the Amazon Drive service. The drive automatically downloads and uploads content from (and to) Amazon Drive to enable instant and offline access to data stored in the cloud - allowing you to not only store your data on the Cloud, but also keep a physical copy of it with you.

Business. Business never changes. Whether you're for Keynes or Hayek, some truths just can't be escaped: and the one based on the market tending to equilibrium between the forces of supply and demand is oft times almost akin to a law of physics - other times, not so much. This time, it appears as if the market forces are steering NAND prices through the roof. The causes? Varied, though you probably carry one of them in your pocket most of the time. We earlier reported surging prices in the DRAM market, spurred by the Note 7 fiasco and increased production of that smartphone's competitors (and Samsung's own products) to fill the gaping hole left by its forcible market removal. But not only by DRAM are smartphones powered - they also make use of NAND flash.

Consumers are creating more higher-resolution and higher volumes of content than ever before. From action cam enthusiasts to selfie lovers to doting parents who capture every milestone moment on their 4K smartphones, the need for even more space to store photos, movies, music and content-and take it on the go-is growing. While data storage demands are ever-increasing, so is the need to organize, centralize and back up that data.

With today's launch of the Backup Plus Portable 5TB drive-the largest capacity mobile drive on the market-Seagate is helping its customers better manage their massive deluge of data. This new storage solution is made possible thanks to Seagate's new BarraCuda internal drive, featuring its breakthrough 2.5-inch 1TB platter technology announced last month.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the new Game Drive for Xbox SSD, offering elite gamers fast boot and load performance. Designed exclusively for Xbox, it's an ultra-portable way to store this holiday season's most popular AAA titles. The Seagate Game Drive for Xbox SSD uses flash storage to improve the gaming experience. Helping gamers get into the action quicker, the Seagate Game Drive reduces waiting at welcome screens and enables quicker transitions between levels in top titles like Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4.

With limited console internal drive capacity and game install sizes continuing to increase, users are looking for ways to expand storage. With 512GB of capacity, the Seagate Game Drive lets gamers store approximately 15 of their favorite titles and downloadable content. Users can archive less frequently played games on their console and keep a huge library of games at their fingertips on the Seagate Game Drive.

Today, LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), announced its Thunderbolt 3 portfolio of storage solutions aimed at helping video professionals excel with ultra high-resolution footage. First, the LaCie Bolt3 combines Thunderbolt 3 speed with the latest M.2 PCIe SSDs to create the world's fastest desktop drive. In addition, the LaCie 12big Thunderbolt 3 and 6big Thunderbolt 3 are ready to handle massive amounts of content thanks to fast transfer speeds, RAID 5/6 security and enterprise-class drives. These storage solutions, design by Neil Poulton, are ideal companions to the all-new MacBook Pro.

For the Bolt3, LaCie harnessed the breakthrough performance potential of Thunderbolt 3 and paired it with two M.2 PCIe SSDs striped into a 2 TB volume. Bolt3 delivers record speeds of up to 2800 MB/s and cuts valuable time off of post-production workflows, such as ingesting RAW footage from RED or Blackmagic cinema cameras or transcoding 4/5/6K footage using Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. What's more, videographers can transfer a terabyte of 4K ProRes 4444 XQ footage from the LaCie Bolt3 to RAID storage-such as the LaCie 12big Thunderbolt 3-in only 5 minutes and 11 seconds.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today launched the industry's fastest and highest-performing hard drive-the Seagate Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6. Featuring capacities up to 900 GB, the drive optimizes mission critical workloads by delivering the industry's highest data performance (up to 315 MB/s sustained transfer rate), enabling enterprise and cloud customers to move critical data where it's needed fast to ensure smooth and seamless connected experiences for business, organization and consumer users-all while lowering total cost of ownership through high reliability, security and easy data center integration.

"Seagate is once again driving innovation to meet the needs of today's data-driven economy," said John Morris, vice president of global HDD products at Seagate. "Our new Enterprise Performance 15K HDD ensures that the data is secure, available on demand and always bringing more value to our customers. With Seagate's broad portfolio of both HDDs and SSDs, we're able to cover the full range of storage solutions, delivering high performance and capacity with affordable versatility to meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's data centers."

Seagate has officially updated their FireCuda line, the solid-state supported, high-capacity hybrid drives. The new, 5th Gen models sport a thinner form-factor (2.5"), rocking the company's multi-tier cache technology as well as 1 TB SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) plates. The SMR plate's difference compared to conventional, perpendicular recording HDD technology allows these hybrid drives to increase storage density by up to 25%, by allowing newly-written magnetic tracks to partly overlap previously-written ones, reducing the amount of platter real-estate occupied.

The caveat with this technology is that the overlapping-tracks architecture may slow down the writing process, since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten as well. However, according to Seagate, the large, multi-tier cache technology and large NAND caches are enough to offset any performance loss incurred by the SMR technology employed on these drives, and then some.

Seagate Technology plc today reported financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2017 ended September 30, 2016. For the first quarter, the Company reported revenue of $2.8 billion, gross margin of 28.6%, net income of $167 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.55. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported gross margin of 29.5%, net income of $299 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.99.

During the first quarter, the Company generated $592 million in operating cash flow and repurchased 3 million ordinary shares for $101 million. Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments totaled approximately $1.5 billion at the end of the quarter. There were 299 million ordinary shares issued and outstanding as of the end of the quarter.

A group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. As new storage class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal. The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low latency storage class memory, and demand for rack scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Global PCle SSD Market 2016-2020" report to their offering. The report forecast the global peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) SSD market to grow at a CAGR of 33.24% during the period 2016-2020. The report has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

According to the report, need for managed service data centers will be a key driver for market growth. It is advantageous for an enterprise to operate a colocation facility rather than to build a data center. Data center colocation allows enterprises to rent computing storage, servers, and network. It enables minimal utilization of power and bandwidth and enhances the security of enterprise IT equipment.

Seagate Technology announced today at the Flash Memory Summit conference two new flash innovations that extend the limits of storage computing performance in enterprise data centers to unprecedented levels. The new products include a 60 terabyte (TB) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid-state-drive (SSD) - the largest SSD ever demonstrated - and the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD. These two new products represent the high performance end of Seagate's Enterprise portfolio - a complete ecosystem of HDD, SSD and storage system products designed to help customers manage the deluge of data they face and move the right data where it's needed fast to meet rapidly evolving business priorities and market demands.

The 60TB SAS SSD and 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD are the newest additions to Seagate's data center portfolio and are designed to help enterprise IT leaders obtain more value from the rapidly expanding amount of data they must contend with, even under the most demanding application requirements. The 60TB SAS SSD features twice the density and four times the capacity of the next highest-capacity SSD available today - equivalent to the capacity needed to accommodate 400 million photos on a typical social media platform, or 12,000 DVD movies. This single controller architecture also delivers the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.

Seagate Technology plc, today unveiled a first-of-its kind, high-capacity drive that can help data centers more easily accommodate exponential data growth, while still maintaining high levels of computing power and performance. The two terabyte (TB) version of its Nytro XM1440 M.2 non-volatile memory express (NVMe) Solid State Drive (SSD) is the highest-capacity, enterprise-class M.2 NVMe SSD available today, making it well suited for demanding enterprise applications that require fast data access, capacity and processing.

As the latest addition to the Seagate Nytro SSD product line, the 2TB Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD is designed to accelerate enterprise data access, with twice the density of prior M.2 NVMe environments. Optimized for read-intensive and mixed workloads, its high capacity and small form factor are ideal for today's cloud and enterprise data center environments, where speed and processing power in a small footprint are increasingly important. The drive can help meet the needs of demanding enterprise applications including online transaction processing, high-performance computing and big data analytics. It also helps manage storage growth with deduplication and compression, allowing data centers to easily create more virtual machines instantly without having to add additional servers - enabling today's data centers to more easily manage their ever-expanding storage growth.

ADATA also unveiled its SR1030 SSD targeted at workstation/enterprise builds. The drive ticks on a Seagate (ex-SandForce) SF-3514 processor, wired to 3D MLC NAND flash, and comes in capacities ranging between 128 GB to 1 TB, with sequential read/write performance rated at up to 560 MB/s reads, with up to 530 MB/s writes. You get a lot of SandForce-made features such as DuraWrite (garbage collection enhancement), Shield and RAISE (protection).

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is now shipping in volume its 10 TB helium enterprise drives - the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD. Engineered to meet the storage needs of top cloud service providers, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD features the industry's lowest power and weight for maximum space efficiency at the lowest energy usage - lowering the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) of today's large scale data centers. Currently the highest capacity drives available worldwide, these innovative new products are now available to purchase direct from global distributors.

"Seagate has the most comprehensive Nearline portfolio in the industry. Each of our Nearline products - including our new flagship 10 TB helium enterprise drive shipping today - is designed to help customers take maximum advantage of top technology trends that have the highest impact on their business," said Mark Re, CTO at Seagate. "While we offer a number of impressive technology advantages, at the end of the day customers really want solutions and insights that help them better leverage the value of their data so they can offer services and capabilities unmatched by their competitors. Seagate's 10TB helium drive is designed with these market mandates front of mind."

Today at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology plc, announced the LaCie 12big Thunderbolt 3, a professional 12-bay desktop RAID storage unit. With up to 96TB of capacity, the breakthrough performance of Thunderbolt 3 and RAID 5/6, the LaCie 12big helps video professionals meet the data demands of 4/5/6K cameras.

At up to 96TB, the LaCie 12big boasts a 50 percent higher capacity than any other desktop direct attached storage solution on the market-with a footprint smaller than a tablet. It features Seagate's enterprise-class drives with a five-year limited warranty for extraordinary reliability and data availability to safely store and edit massive amounts of ultra hi-res footage.

Seagate Technology plc today unveiled a production-ready unit of the fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) demonstrated to date, with throughput performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). The early unit meets Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, making it ideal for hyperscale data centers looking to adopt the fastest flash technology with the latest and most sustainable standards. The 10 GB/s unit, which is expected to be released this summer, is more than 4GB/s faster than the previous fastest-industry SSD on the market. It also meets the OCP storage specifications being driven by Facebook, which will help reduce the power and cost burdens traditionally associated with operating at this level of performance.

"Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use," said Brett Pemble, Seagate's general manager and vice president of SSD Products. "Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value. Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains." The technology would work with any system that supports the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol, which was developed by Seagate and other consortium vendors to replace the legacy Serial AT Attachment (SATA) standards and eliminate informational bottlenecks. NVMe helps reduce layers of commands to create a faster, simpler language between flash devices.

This week on TechPowerUp News: New AMD CPUs and APUs hit the stores; Seagate served a class-action lawsuit over false reliability claims of its hard drives; and more details of AMD "Zen" architecture.

Hard drive major Seagate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of abnormally high failure rates for its 1.5 TB and 3 TB internal and external/portable hard drives. It also accuses the company of false claims over "reliability" and "dependability" in its marketing.

The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today launched its first 10TB enterprise capacity hard disk drive (HDD), merging high capacity with the industry's lowest power and weight available in a 10TB drive, to meet the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based data centers. The Seagate Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD has been selected by enterprise market leaders globally for its ability to address storage demands unlike any other technology in the industry.

"Cloud-based data center storage needs are expanding faster than many current infrastructures can sustain, rendering the capacity demands of users a herculean task for cloud managers," said Mark Re, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Seagate. "Built on our years of research and development of sealed-drive technology, our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organizations worldwide solve the needs of their growing storage business."