TrendForce's latest report on enterprise SSDs reveals that a surge in demand for AI has led AI server customers to significantly increase their orders for enterprise SSDs over the past two quarters. Upstream suppliers have been accelerating process upgrades and planning for 2YY products—slated to enter mass production in 2025—in order to meet the growing demand for SSDs in AI applications.

TrendForce observes that increased orders for enterprise SSDs from AI server customers have resulted in contract prices for this category rising by over 80% from 4Q23 to 3Q24. SSDs play a crucial role in AI development. In AI model training, SSDs primarily store model parameters, including evolving weights and deviations.

Western Digital has launched its first dual actuator hard drive, in the shape of the Ultrastar DC HS760 Hard Drive, which is currently only available in a single 20 TB SKU. This places WD's new drive head to head with Seagates Exos X20 drives, although Seagate offers an 18 and a 20 TB SKU. WD offers the Ultrastar DC HS760 with a SAS interface, whereas Seagate offers its Exos drives with either SATA or SAS connectivity. Both companies are using traditional CMR platters that spin at 7,200 RPM.

WD didn't provide too many details when it comes to the performance of the Ultrastar DC HS760, as the company only claims it offers twice the sequential throughput and 1.7 times higher random performance compared with the Ultrastar DC HC560. WD appears to have a potential performance advantage over Seagate, as WD has integrated its OptiNAND technology based on WD's iNAND, which means that the Ultrastar DC HS760 should have at least twice as much cache as Seagates Exos X20 drives which top out at 256 MB. This is based on WD's DC HC560 drives which ship with 512 MB of cache. Just like Seagates Exos drives, the Ultrastar DC HS760 is a helium filled drive and WD claims 2.5 million MTBF time and offers a five year warranty. No pricing was revealed.

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.

Although 20 TB hard drives aren't a new thing by now, Western Digital's latest drive for NAS appliances are doing things a bit differently by incorporating WD's OptiNAND technology. The WD Red Pro family is Western Digital's higher-end family of NAS drives and have a generally good reputation in the market. The drive is made up out of nine ePMR (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording) platters, each coming in at 2.2 TB. As with the previously launched drives in the Red Pro family, we're looking at a 7,200 rpm drive with a SATA 6 Gbps interface. The internal transfer rate is said to reach up to 268 MB/s which makes it the second fastest drive in the series, just behind the 18 TB version.

What makes the 20 TB SKU unique in the Red Pro series though is the inclusion of 64 GB of WD's own iNAND flash. Western Digital's iNAND could be considered a DRAM-less SSD in a single chip package and in this case, it's used as a large chunk of cache for the hard drive. One other benefit of the OptiNAND technology according to WD is that up to 100 MB of data in the 512 MB DRAM write cache that the drive also has, can be flushed to the iNAND in case of an unexpected power cut to the drive. This could help save important data that is in transit during a worst case scenario and seems like a great addition to a hard drive that's targeting NAS applications. The WD Red Pro 20 TB is on sale now for US$499.99.

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.

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.

Novachips Co., Ltd., an innovator in flash storage solutions, today announced that it has started shipping a newcomer in its SCALAR Series of high-capacity SSDs. The new entrant, SCALAR-20T, is a 2.5-inch SATA MLC (Multi-Level Cell) 20 TB SSD that is entirely based on in-house hardware and firmware. SCALAR-20T utilizes Novachips' NVS3800 controller, and no third-party components—including JBOD and RAID component chips—are built into the device.

Since launching the world's first 2.5-inch SATA and NVMe MLC 8 TB in 2015, Novachips has consistently broken new ground in the massive capacity flash storage arena. The standard bus topology interface between SSD controllers and NAND flash memory has proven a limiting factor in flash storage capacity innovation. Novachips has resolved this structural problem by using a unique point-to-point ring topology. This technology has helped Novachips build its most recent, 20 TB capacity SSD, without compromising on performance or reliability from channel noise over its guaranteed lifetime.

In its latest earnings call, Seagate, a manufacturer of high-capacity drives, has revealed several interesting points about its upcoming releases of next-generation hard drives. More specifically, the company has disclosed a shift to a new generation of HDDs based on so-called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. This technology is set to bring many improvements compared to the one currently used by Seagate's rivals like Western Digital. The rivaling company uses energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) and microwave-assisted (MAMR) technologies and it already has a 20 TB drive in the offering. Seagate announced that they will unveil a 20 TB HDD in December this year, with the use of HAMR technology, which will bring many improvements like better speed and more efficient disk read/write.

"We remain on track to ship 20-TB HAMR drives starting in December, which is an important milestone, as we believe HAMR technology will be the industry's path to scaling a real density and increasing drive capacities," said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. "Seagate will be the first to ship this crucial technology with a path to deliver 50-TB HAMR drives forecast in 2026."

Continuously innovating to help organizations keep pace with rapidly expanding volumes of data, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that it is extending its HDD technology and capacity leadership into its broader portfolio of data center solutions. Leveraging innovations from the Ultrastar 18 TB and 20 TB HDD technology platform, the WD Gold family now features new 16 TB and 18 TB CMR HDD capacities. Also available are an upgraded line of Ultrastar JBOD platforms and an Ultrastar hybrid storage server featuring Ultrastar 16 TB and 18 TB CMR HDDs. Through Western Digital's vertical integration capabilities and broad portfolio, the company continues to be uniquely positioned to help customers meet data demands as they design their storage infrastructures for better efficiency and productivity.

"Western Digital's expanded family of data center HDD solutions clearly addresses a variety of customer needs, which puts them in a unique early position to capitalize on cloud and OEM customer transitions to 18 TB, and even to 20 TB for those optimizing the benefits of SMR," said John Chen, vice president at TRENDFOCUS. "Capacity-enterprise HDDs will continue to dominate the nearline and secondary storage market as there is simply no other cost-effective substitute for data at scale. As a result, we expect nearline disk drive exabytes shipments to grow at a 32.5% CAGR, reaching 1.9 zettabytes by 2024."

Western Digital announced that it has started shipping the industry's highest-capacity HDD samples to enterprise OEMs and hyperscale customers worldwide. The 20 TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18 TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs, first previewed in June 2019, and announced in September 2019, feature its first-ever commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology on a nine-disk platform, enabling customers to more efficiently provision and scale their data center environments with unmatched total cost of ownership.

With zettabyte-scale data growth, the need for higher-capacity data storage across a broad spectrum of applications and workloads can be reliably met only with high Capacity Enterprise HDDs. The industry-leading capacities of Western Digital's Ultrastar 20 TB SMR and 18 TB CMR HelioSeal HDDs enable customers to deploy up to 22 percent fewer racks and reduce their TCO by up to 11 percent, along with the corresponding reductions in power consumption, cooling costs, and data center infrastructure needs when compared with today's 14 TB CMR HDDs.

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.

Addressing the TCO requirements of data center customers, Western Digital announced its nine-disk mechanical platform, which includes energy-assisted recording technology and maintains the company's areal density leadership while delivering the highest capacity available. The company will sample the 18 TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDD and the 20 TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDD to select customers by the end of 2019 with production ramp expected in the first half of 2020.

This rapid ramp and availability of the 20 TB SMR drive following a technology preview in June 2019, supports a growing ecosystem and the continued industry adoption of SMR. Western Digital estimates that 50 percent of its HDD exabytes shipped will be on SMR by 2023. "At Dropbox, we are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency and power in our data centers," said Akhil Gupta, vice president of engineering at Dropbox. "We're excited to see SMR drives reach a 20 TB capacity point, which will enable us to power collaboration and deliver long-term value to our customers."