Dec 19th, 2024 09:11 EST change timezone

New Forum Posts

Popular Reviews

Controversial News Posts

News Posts matching #Seagate

Return to Keyword Browsing

Seagate Bringing RAID 0 Performance to Single HDD via Multi-Actuator Tech

Seagate may currently be one of the first tech companies in storage conversations due to their upcoming HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, which should enable 20 TB HDDs by 2020. And even though HDDs are better known for their high areal density and price/storage ratio, which is only bound to increase through the usage of HAMR, Seagate knows that areal density is hardly one of the principal bottlenecks in HDD technology. The bottleneck, as it usually is, is speed.

HDDs have an old design philosophy by now, where an actuator arm moves read/writing heads in parallel across the surface of the disk - nowadays, there are usually two heads per platter (one on the upper side, and one on the underside of it). As you might image, a given head can either read or write at one point in time - and all heads move in tandem, with different heads reading or writing across the multiple spinning discs that constitute the hard drive. This, however, means that HDD reading efficiency is lost - due to how small the 1s and 0s are on HDDs, only one head can be moved to an exact data path, with all the others moving with it, spending power and increasing the load on the actuator for nary a speed gain or minimal workload.

What is HAMR and How Does It Enable the High-Capacity Needs of the Future?

The following was posted by Seagate Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Mark Re, in a Guest Blog Post on Backblaze: "Earlier this year Seagate announced plans to make the first hard drives using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR, available by the end of 2018 in pilot volumes. Even as today's market has embraced 10TB+ drives, the need for 20TB+ drives remains imperative in the relative near term. HAMR is the Seagate research team's next major advance in hard drive technology.

HAMR is a technology that over time will enable a big increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a disk. A small laser is attached to a recording head, designed to heat a tiny spot on the disk where the data will be written. This allows a smaller bit cell to be written as either a 0 or a 1. The smaller bit cell size enables more bits to be crammed into a given surface area - increasing the areal density of data, and increasing drive capacity.

Seagate Launches First Drive For AI-Enabled Surveillance

Seagate Technology plc. announced today its SkyHawk AI hard disk drive (HDD), the first drive created specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled video surveillance solutions. Building on Seagate's 10-year track record of delivering surveillance optimized storage performance, SkyHawk AI provides unprecedented bandwidth and processing power to manage always-on, data-intensive workloads, while simultaneously analyzing and recording footage from multiple HD cameras.

Analytics on video surveillance hardware is growing exponentially, forecasted to increase from 27.6 million shipments in 2016 to 126 million shipments in 2021 (Cropley, 2017), as hardware manufacturers continue to include analytics sensors on network video recorders (NVRs). This will only increase as AI - particularly deep learning and machine learning applications, such as facial recognition and analyzing irregularities in behavior - become increasingly prevalent. In parallel, the need for fast video analytics will continue to rise, increasing the workload burden on NVR storage.

Seagate Ready with HAMR Technology Enabling 20TB HDDs by 2018

Hot on the heels of Western Digital's announcement of an MAMR breakthrough enabling 40 TB hard drives in the near future, rival Seagate announced a magnetic storage technology breakthrough of its own, dubbed HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording). This technology will enable the development of hard drives with over 20 terabytes (TB) unformatted capacity by the end of 2018, which is a faster ramp-up than WD's 2019 timeline for the first MAMR-based drives. The first Seagate HAMR-based HDDs will ship with capacities of 20 TB, with the company promising 40 TB drives by 2023, well ahead of the 2025 timeline for 40 TB drives promised by WD.

Seagate HAMR is a fundamentally different technology than Western Digital MAMR. While MAMR relies on a spin-torque oscillator to generate a microwave field that burns finer magnetized bits on the disk, thereby increasing areal densities to 40 Tb per square inch, Seagate HAMR uses an extremely fine laser to heat up the RW head, creating finer magnetized bits. The physical layer of each bit is heated and cooled within nanoseconds, and hence a HAMR RW head draws relatively lower amounts of power - up to 8W for a random-write operation (the most power-consuming operation for a drive). Seagate promises RW endurance of 2 PB.

Seagate Technology Reports Fiscal First Quarter 2018 Financial Results

Seagate Technology plc. today reported financial results for the quarter ended September 29, 2017. For the first quarter, the Company reported revenue of $2.6 billion, gross margin of 28.0%, net income of $181 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.62. On a non-GAAP basis, which excludes the net impact of certain items, Seagate reported gross margin of 29.0%, net income of $279 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.96.

During the first quarter, the Company generated $237 million in cash flow from operations and returned approximately $350 million to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. Cash and cash equivalents totaled approximately $2.3 billion at the end of the quarter. There were 289 million ordinary shares issued and outstanding as of the end of the quarter.

"The results of our performance this quarter reflect solid execution and market demand for our storage product portfolio," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer. "Seagate delivered record levels of exabyte shipments and generated sequential growth in revenue and profit. As the demand for storage continues to benefit from the proliferation of data, Seagate is in a strong position to grow its businesses, improve profitability and continue with its shareholder-return objectives."

Seagate Announces 12TB Hard Drives for Desktop and NAS Applications

Seagate Technology plc. announced today its IronWolf, IronWolf Pro and BarraCuda Pro hard drives are now available at capacities up to 12TB. Offering the highest capacity, reliability and performance in the industry among network-attached storage (NAS) and desktop HDDs, Seagate's 12TB IronWolf and BarraCuda Pro drives further extend the capabilities of the leading Seagate Guardian Series to meet the growing data needs of large enterprise business, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and creative professionals.

Across the globe, we are experiencing a massive increase in the volume of data created, with a recent study by IDC and Seagate finding that data creation will swell to a total of 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025, 10x more than today. Seagate's latest portfolio of 12TB drives are designed for today's media storage needs - including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), 4K resolution and 360-degree videos - and offer scalability for the future with increased space and speed.

Seagate and Baidu Sign Strategic Cooperation Agreement for Big Data Analysis

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.

Attacks Discovered that can Corrupt MLC-based SSD Data

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.

Seagate And DJI Announce New Portable Drive for Camera Drones

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 Elects Facebook and Toshiba to Board

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's 2016 HDD Failure Stats Revealed: HGST the Most Reliable

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.

Seagate is Shutting Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

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 Duet Announced: Amazon Cloud-Syncing Portable HDD

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.

SSD Pricing to Surge on the Back of NAND Shortages - Stock Your SSD Needs

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.

Seagate Announces the Backup Plus 5TB Portable HDD

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 Enhances Gaming Experience with New Game Drive for Xbox SSD

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.

LaCie Announces World's Fastest Desktop Storage

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 Launches World's Fastest Hard Drive for Mission Critical Applications

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 Introduces the 5th Gen FireCuda SSHDs - Up to 2 TB, 8Gb NAND

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 Reports Fiscal First Quarter 2017 Financial Results

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.

Industry Leaders Join Forces to Promote New High-Performance Interconnect

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.

Global PCle SSD Market to Grow 33.24% by 2020

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 Accelerates Enterprise Momentum With Two New Flash Products

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 Announces Industry-First 2TB M.2 Enterprise SSD

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 Unveils SR1030 Enterprise MLC SSD

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).
Return to Keyword Browsing
Dec 19th, 2024 09:11 EST change timezone

New Forum Posts

Popular Reviews

Controversial News Posts