Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) today announces that Toshiba, a committed technology leader, led all HDD companies in year-on-year Nearline HDD average capacity growth in 2020. Toshiba followed up an astounding 55% year-on-year growth in 2019 with an impressive 35% year-on-year growth in 2020 to lead the industry for a second consecutive year, according to TRENDFOCUS, Inc.'s data.

"Toshiba has done an admirable job of leveraging its industry-first 9-disk helium design to introduce competitive Nearline HDD products in a timely fashion. This has been the cornerstone in the company's ability to launch higher capacity Nearline HDD programs," stated John Chen, Vice President at TRENDFOCUS, Inc. "Toshiba's 9-disk helium-sealed HDD platform has enabled the company to achieve the highest five-year Compound Annual Growth Rates for Nearline HDD Units, Exabytes, and Average Capacity shipped through 2020."

Proliferation of digital content being created and replicated has led to an explosive growth of data centers around the world. Demand for storage has fueled HDD Exabyte growth, and for the first time in 2020, HDD Exabyte shipments topped 1ZB¹ across all storage applications, from edge to core. The meteoric climb in capacity shipped is a testament to the HDD industry's ability to deliver the most cost-effective and performance delivering storage medium in the market.

Synology Inc. today unveiled the next generation of RackStation units that support its highly successful backup, virtualization storage, surveillance, and remote work solutions. In a company first, it also announced the release of its HAT5300 series of high-performance enterprise hard drives specially engineered for Synology deployments.

The 2U 12-bay RS3621RPxs and RS3621xs+, and the 3U 16-bay RS4021xs+ are designed for SMBs that require high-performance general-purpose storage. Synology's newest devices provide a reliable platform for data-intensive applications such as large-scale backup, ISCSi SAN storage, on-premises collaboration solutions, and video surveillance deployments.

Teaming with 343 Industries, Seagate today announced the latest addition to its popular line of storage for gamers - Game Drive for Xbox Halo: Master Chief Limited Edition. Celebrating the legendary Master Chief from the Halo video game franchise, this limited edition Game Drive features a one-of-a-kind sleek case design that celebrates the Master Chief John-117. A limited Master Chief vinyl die-cut sticker set also comes in the box for fans to collect. The new drive is available in 2 TB and 5 TB capacities so gamers can install more games and downloadable game content by balancing their gaming workload between console and external HDD.

Gamers can easily begin their Halo journey as the Game Drive is compatible with and automatically recognized by the full family of Xbox One devices, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S consoles, and easily installed in under two minutes through Xbox OS. It is USB 3.2 Gen 1 bus powered and does not need a separate power cord to play so fans can unite in their mission from anywhere. Users can play legacy games and archive next generation games on the Game Drive which can store more than 502 downloaded games.

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."

Toshiba announces the Toshiba MG08-D Series HDDs, designed for a wide variety of business-critical applications, such as email and CRM (Customer Resource Management), data analysis for business intelligence, small-medium business servers, and data-retention and compliance archiving.

Toshiba's 7th generation air mechanical design provides better power efficiency and a lower component count to deliver better total cost of ownership than its earlier generation models. The new series features 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB models, in both SATA and SAS interfaces. The new 4 TB1 models are available in 512e, 4Kn and 512n sector models, and the 6 TB and 8 TB models are available in 512e and 4Kn sector models, assuring plug-and-play interoperability for applications using prior 4 TB models.

Empowering the world's most essential data infrastructures, Western Digital Corp. today announced that Dropbox Inc., a leading global collaboration platform, is one of the first to qualify the Ultrastar DC HC650 20 TB, host-managed, shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drives (HDD). With Western Digital SMR HDDs serving as the storage foundation for its custom-built, multi-exabyte storage platforms, Dropbox continues its strategic path, taking advantage of the highest storage densities with the lowest TCO without sacrificing data durability and availability for its 600 million+ online customers.

"We've been working with Western Digital for many years, and throughout several phases of our storage platform development," said Andrew Fong, vice president of engineering, Dropbox. "Online tools and services are more important than ever before, so we need to be able to quickly innovate, expand functionality and scale to help stay competitive. We look forward to deploying these higher capacity 20 TB SMR hard drives to further our cost savings and to provide our customers with even more value. Western Digital is an important strategic partner and we look forward to continuously pushing cloud infrastructure boundaries together."

The memory market is expected to remain in a state of oversupply during Q4 2020 for both DRAM and NAND flash according to a new report from TrendForce. This oversupply will mean ~10% lower prices for memory in Q4 2020 with further price drops in 2021, this will result in falling SSD prices of 10-15%. These price drops in the consumer market will likely result in the lowest SSD pricing seen to date. These reductions were mainly driven by Huawei losing access to foreign DRAM and NAND memory which wasn't fully taken up by other smartphone manufacturers leading to an access of supply. These lower SSD prices will help accelerate the decline of HDDs in consumer devices as price parity gets closer.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products including network-attached storage (NAS) devices, launches the D8 Thunderbolt 3 8-bay professional-grade RAID storage. Designed for professional creators, the TerraMaster D8 Thunderbolt 3 offers large storage capacity support of up to 128 TB along with fast read and write speeds delivered by Thunderbolt 3 technology.

The TerraMaster D8 Thunderbolt 3 via its 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 interface can deliver speeds of up to 1600 MB/s. It is the perfect storage solution for non-linear editing applications such as 4K video editing, allowing professional creators to enjoy rapid video workflows. The D8 Thunderbolt 3 also offers high scalability allowing creators to daisy-chain more than five devices in a single Thunderbolt 3 connection. Creators can daisy-chain up to two 4K monitors to create a smart working space with large displays for professional video editing and productivity.

Apricorn, the leading manufacturer of software-free, 256-bit AES XTS hardware-encrypted USB data storage devices, today announced the release of an 18 TB version of its Aegis Padlock DT FIPS Desktop Drives. Continuing its history of innovation and industry leadership, Apricorn is the first to bring an 18 TB encrypted drive to market, delivering high performance and mass capacity.

The Padlock DT FIPS Desktop Drives come with AegisWare - the proprietary firmware and feature set recognizable of Apricorn's Aegis Secure Drives and Secure Keys. Consistent with the Apricorn line of secure drives, all passwords and commands are entered by way of the device's onboard keypad. One hundred percent of the authentication and encryption processes take place within the device itself and never involve software or share passwords / encryption keys with its host computer. Additionally, all have military grade 256-bit AES XTS encryption so firmware is locked down and can't be updated or modified, defending against malware and ensuring data remains secure and accessible only by the user.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in data storage and management solutions, today announced it is shipping 18 TB SkyHawk Artificial Intelligence drives in volume. SkyHawk AI is the world's first purpose-built hard drive for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Surveillance solutions, enabling quicker and smarter decisions. The new drive supports deep learning and machine learning workload streams for Edge applications with ImagePerfectAI.

The capacity to retain more data over time is required for deep learning systems to become smarter and more accurate in their predictive analysis, and behavior analysis requires significantly more data than traditional video capture. SkyHawk AI simultaneously sustains 32 AI streams alongside 64 video streams and supports multi-bay NVR and AI-enabled NVR. SkyHawk AI offers a 550 TB/year workload rate, more than 3× the workload rate of standard surveillance hard drives in order to manage data deluge in complex video security system environments without sacrificing performance. This drive intelligently adapts between traditional video workloads and video+AI workloads.

Enabling customers to design and build solutions for a variety of smart video workloads, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced its expanded family of WD Purple storage solutions, including the industry's highest capacity 18 TB surveillance HDD for DVRs, NVRs and analytics appliances, and the 1 TB WD Purple SC QD101 microSD card for AI-enabled cameras. Setting the bar for smart video applications, all WD Purple drives are optimized to help reduce frame loss and pixelation, improve overall video playback and enhance streaming for 24x7 workloads - from ingest to backup and long-term storage - as the industry broadens the use of deep learning and analytics.

From commercial buildings to municipalities, businesses are accelerating adoption of AI and deep learning to enable automation and better efficiencies that ultimately help create a safer and better experience for employees, customers and communities. Deep learning algorithms, hungry for data generated by IoT and edge ecosystems, demand higher resolution for better accuracy, increasing the need for storage capacity in cameras and NVRs. In its recent report, Video Surveillance & Analytics Intelligence Service, July 2020, Omdia states that shipments of cameras enabled with deep learning algorithms will continue growing at a five-year (2019-2024) CAGR of 67 percent, and NVRs enabled with deep-learning analytics will grow at 37 percent. Meanwhile, video analytics appliances shipments are expected to grow at 43 percent. In addition, a 2020 Western Digital-commissioned survey of North American security system integration companies found that 76 percent of them see video analytics and AI as playing an ever-increasing role in their deployments.

Western Digital Corp. today announced a significant step in the ongoing implementation of its diversified storage portfolio strategy by forming separate product business units for its Flash and HDD technology assets. The Flash business and the HDD business will each be led by a general manager and will align the company's diversified portfolio to an acceleration strategy designed for growth, profitability and development agility. By delivering both Flash and HDD market-leading innovation through highly focused product development organizations, Western Digital's strategy positions the company to leverage its strong go-to-market and operational synergies and uniquely address broad customer storage needs from edge devices to cloud infrastructure.

Also today, Western Digital announced the appointment of Robert Soderbery as executive vice president and general manager of its new Flash business unit. A thirty-year technology and business veteran, Soderbery is responsible for all Flash portfolio strategy, product development and business results and will lead engineering and product management teams focused on delivering the company's Flash innovation. The company confirmed an executive search is underway for a general manager who will lead its HDD product business.

Seagate Technology, a world leader in data storage and management solutions, today announced the results of a global survey of 3,000 small and medium sized business (SMB) decision-makers. The survey, commissioned by Seagate, reveals that despite economic headwinds, existing SMB IT infrastructure for many SMBs has shown resilience, and a majority of SMBs believe business data will play an important role in their long-term recovery plans. The company also announced an update to its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive lines, aimed at home and small office environments, with new 18 TB capacity HDD and new SATA SSD models. These new drives deliver unrivaled speed, capacity, and stamina to bring reliable, scalable, and consistent performance to NAS solutions.

Despite the rapid and unexpected shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, existing SMB IT infrastructure proved resilient, according to Seagate research. More than half (54%) of SMB decision-makers reported no difficulty in accessing files or company data remotely, and 61% reported similar productivity levels to when their employees are in the office. 45% of SMB decision-makers reported their company's existing data infrastructure was more resilient than expected during the pandemic. All SMBs included in the study have fewer than 250 employees, and the majority have fewer than 50.

As of June 30, 2020, Backblaze had 142,630 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,271 boot drives and 140,059 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 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. As always, we look forward to your comments.

Quarterly Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q2 2020
At the end of Q2 2020, Backblaze was using 140,059 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 139,867 hard drives in our review. The table below covers what happened in Q2 2020.

Chenbro has launched the RB23708, a Level 6, 2U rackmount server barebone designed for mission-critical, storage-focused applications in Data Center and HPC Enterprise. The RB23708 is pre-integrated with an Intel Server Board S2600WFTR that supports up to two 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" Processors.

The RB23708 is an easy-to-use barebones server solution that pre-integrates a 2-socket Intel Server Board to ensure a flexible, scalable design with mission-critical reliability. Notably, it offers Apache Pass, IPMI 2.0 & Redfish compliance, and includes Intel RSTe/Intel VROC options, providing an ideal solution for hosting Video, IMS, SaaS and similar storage-focused applications.

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."

OWC a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company and one of the world's most respected providers of Memory, External Drives, SSDs, Mac & PC docking solutions and performance upgrade kits, today announced that their new ThunderBay Flex 8 media workflow solution, revealed at CES 2020, is now shipping. A cutting-edge approach for world class Thunderbolt 3 storage, dollar for dollar, there is no better way for serious media professionals to handle their storage, connectivity, and PCIe expansion needs.

The exciting new ThunderBay Flex 8 is a recipient of the 2020 Future Best of Show Award, presented by Video Edge. Video Edge awarded the ThunderBay Flex 8 their Special Edition Best of Show Award in the store, charge and connect category. The awards are evaluated by a panel of engineers and industry experts, and are selected based on innovation, feature set, cost efficiency and performance in serving the industry. A Special Edition of the award program was held this year in the absence of a physical NAB Show.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched the quad-core 1.70 GHz 2.5 GbE TS-x31P3 series NAS. Available in 2-bay and 4-bay models, the TS-x31P3 series provides smooth multimedia playback, supports Snapshot backup and HBS (Hybrid Backup Sync) for local, offsite and cloud backup. The TS-x31P3 series is recommended for home and office users that want to benefit from 2.5 GbE networking to accelerate everyday usage and disaster recovery.

With 1 GbE and 2.5 GbE ports, the TS-x31P3 series allows users to easily adopt high-speed networking. Existing CAT5e/CAT6 cables can be used to connect a TS-x31P3 series model to a 2.5 GbE switch to enable faster backup and smoother media streaming. Three USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports allow users to connect various peripherals and devices - including expansion enclosures to flexibly expand the TS-x31P3's storage capacity. The TS-x31P3 series comes with 2 GB or 4 GB RAM as standard and supports up to 8 GB RAM.

Western Digital started selling an 18 TB variant of its WD Gold line of "enterprise class" SATA hard drives (model: WD181KRYZ). The WD Gold series tops the company's SATA HDD lineup and its in the gray area between client and scalar enterprise segments, where the company sells its HGST Ultrastar HDDs. WD Gold drives are still rated for 24x7 operation, and can be safely used in large RAID arrays. The drives are confirmed to lack SMR and DM-SMR; and are confirmed to use CMR (conventional magnetic recording), which ensures predictable write speeds and random-write performance. The WD Gold WD181KRYZ features 7,200 RPM spindle speed, HelioSeal technology (the main disk chamber is sealed and filled with inert helium gas), and 2.5 million-hour MTBF. Performance numbers and cache size for the 18 TB model are unknown, but the 14 TB variant in this series offers up to 267 MB/s sequential transfers, and features a 512 MB DRAM write cache. The WD181KRYZ is listed on UK store SCAN for £520.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched the new lightweight, quiet, and feature-rich TS-230 NAS that can easily fit into any living environment. Adorned with a refreshing baby blue hue, the TS-230 is ideal for home and daily central storage, back up, photo and video sharing. All digital assets on the TS-230 are securely protected by the powerful snapshot function. Coupled with multimedia apps and transcoding feature support, the TS-230 is an ideal entry-level NAS for creating a smart and fun lifestyle.

The TS-230 uses a Realtek RTD1296 quad-core 1.4 GHz processor and built-in 2 GB DDR4 RAM for meeting personal and home NAS applications. It provides one Gigabit port and supports SATA6 Gbps disk drives, AES-256 encryption, and SSD caching. The cooling fan uses an HDB type Sintetico bearing fan for maintaining high airflow and low noise, providing better cooling for the TS-230 to ensure constant system operation. The tool-less hard drive installation makes TS-230 setup easy even for a NAS newbie.

The introduction of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology has enabled HDD manufacturers, such as Toshiba, to increase the capacity of their spinning platter drives beyond that of existing approaches. SMR technology is recognized as having an impact on write-speeds in drives where this technology is used, especially in the case of continuous random writing. For this reason, Toshiba products are carefully tailored to specific workloads and use cases.

For example, in use cases such as network-attached storage (NAS), where continuous random writing regularly occurs, Toshiba's current product line for consumers features the N300, which does not use SMR.

Western Digital gave its first response to allegations of the company implementing SMR (shingled magnetic recording) on its WD Red internal hard drives without properly documenting it. The WD Red series is extensively marketed as being "NAS optimized," which caused many NAS and RAID DAS enthusiasts to pick it up for home-office use, only to discover that the company's implementation of drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) makes them effectively unfit for RAID use, as DM-SMR is vital for some of the higher-capacity WD Red models to achieve their nameplate capacity, while coming at a heavy cost of random write performance.

"SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data for personal and business use. We are continuously innovating to advance it. SMR technology is implemented in different ways - drive-managed SMR (DMSMR), on the device itself, as in the case of our lower capacity (2 TB - 6 TB) WD Red HDDs, and host-managed SMR, which is used in high-capacity data center applications. Each implementation serves a different use case, ranging from personal computing to some of the largest data centers in the world.," Western Digital writes.

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).

Long gone are the days where your console's storage alone would do the trick and handle large gaming libraries. With a growing list of games willingly taking more than 100 GB of storage space, having a safe option where to store your games is a necessity. The A62 game drive positions itself as an ideal solution thanks to a high storage capacity, and plug and play interface.

With capacity up to 2 TB, the A62 game drive has been specially designed for gamers looking to expand their gaming libraries. Save up to 50 games on average without compromising your console's storage. Moreover, with super-speed USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface, the A62 game drive delivers swift transfer speeds, up to 5 Gbps.