Seagate - The Year in Storage

We’ve seen more dramatic years in storage. In 2012, there was no natural disaster that wiped out manufacturing facilities. No company jumped into the headlines with news of holographic recording breakthroughs or ways to turn your cat in 14 petabytes of bio-storage capacity. (Pet-abyte...get it?) Yet 2012 brought us a few key developments that are quietly shaping how we will deal with storage in 2013. Whether you’re a home user or an enterprise purchaser, it’s worth your while to give these developments some thought and consider how they might play into your own storage strategy for the coming year.
Today’s Storage at a Glance
It’s interesting how some things seem to come full circle. IBM delivered the first commercial disk storage product in 1956 with its IBM 305 RAMAC. The first disk drive for PCs didn’t arrive until 1980 with Shugart/Seagate’s premiere 5.25” hard drive, the ST-506, which weighed in at a remarkable five megabytes. Over the following two decades, the magnetic storage market exploded at a phenomenal rate, at one point peaking with over 200 vendors.


The inherent problem will be familiar to anybody involved in semiconductors. As technologies evolved and fabrication nodes continued to shrink, improving magnetic storage densities continued to become more difficult and costly. Advances were necessary for any manufacturer wanting to stay competitive and popular, but fewer and fewer could afford to stay in the game.  Some companies continue to leverage partnerships, but the majority have either been acquired by larger fish or else folded. For instance, consider the 1 TB disk platters recently debuted by Seagate that are now becoming widespread across 3.5” hard drives. A 1 TB platter requires an areal density of 625 Gb per square inch. In 2006, Seagate had only announced (and not even started production on) platters with a 421 Gb/in2 density. A 50% density increase in roughly six years is a breakneck improvement speed requiring radical engineering at the fringes of modern physics. Only a handful of storage companies are left able to operate at this level.
Today, there are five hard drive brands being sold by the remaining major manufacturers: HGST, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, and WD. Some people view this level of manufacturing contraction as a negative thing, but in many ways it was inevitable, and in a few it was beneficial. Again referencing semiconductors, there are reasons why only a few companies, such as Intel, Global Foundries, and TMSC are able to manufacture processors below the 40 nm fabrication node. Plants able to produce chips or drives at these levels cost billions of dollars, and the requisite R&D to sustain a future road map costs hundreds of millions more. Without a highly integrated, vertical company sporting a significant asset base, holding to such road maps would be impossible.


 http://www.tomshardware.com/us/sponsored/Seagate-the-year-in-storage-198