Tag: Seagate

Sales of slim HDDs are soaring

Posted on July 23, 2013 by - News, Products

seagate-hddEarlier this year Seagate and Western Digital introduced a range of 5-millimetre and 7-millimetre HDDs/SSHDs and it appears they will have no shortage of customers. According to IHS, sales of 5- and 7-millimetre drives will soar to 133 million units by 2017, up from just five million last year.

Ultra thin hard drives and hybrid drives are used in Ultrabooks and other thin devices, which are expected to slowly squeeze more traditional form factors out of the consumer market in coming years.

IHS reckons shipments of 9.5mm drives will drop to 79 million units by 2017, down from 245 million in 2012, reports Electronicsfeed.

However, it won’t all be smooth sailing for hard drive makers. Shipments of SSDs are still growing at a fast pace. SSD shipments are projected to climb some 90 percent this year, hitting 64.6 million units, whereas hard drives shipments are slowing down. They are expected to drop five percent to 545.8 million units. Ultra thin hard drives and hybrids will help in the short term, but SSDs will continue to find new markets as prices of NAND drop.

The big hope for hard drive makers is that they will manage to score more design wins with their new thin drives, as they are still a lot cheaper than SSDs. This is where they can expect some help from Microsoft, as Windows 8.x is a lot more bloated than iOS or Android, so there is a chance that cheap Windows hybrids and tablets will have to use mechanical drives, or hybrid drives.

“Both the thinner HDDs along with hybrid HDDs could even start finding acceptance in ultrathin PCs and tablet PCs—two products that now mostly use solid-state drives as their storage element. Hard disks have lost market share to SSDs, which offer better performance and can be more easily used to achieve a thinner and lighter form factor crucial to tablets and ultrathin PCs,” said Fang Zhang, storage systems analyst at IHS.

In the long run, however, hard drives have no place in tablets or hybrids, or 2-in-1s as Intel likes to call them these days. In any case they are a cheap and proven interim alternative, as they will enable vendors to come up with cheaper ultrathin devices before SSD prices come down to acceptable levels.

Seagate thinks SSDs and HDDs can coexist

Posted on July 17, 2013 by - News, Products

hdd-hugeNow that it has started peddling solid-state drives of its own, Seagate seems to think there is plenty of room for SSDs and HDDs to coexist, with hybrid drives serving like a buffer of sorts.

In other words, hybrid drives will be the equivalent of Belgium or Bosnia, which means they don’t exactly have a bright future in the long run. Sooner or later SSDs will come knocking at their door.

In an interview with the Korea Herald, Seagate VP Banseng Teh said the future of storage lies not in hard drives or unit sales, but in storage capacity. Commenting on reports that Samsung might ditch its desktop PC business, Teh said such a turn of events wouldn’t have much of an impact on Seagate. It is worth noting that Samsung has denied that it is pulling out of desktops.

“The volume of what we ship to desktop makers including Samsung is admittedly retreating, but this trend does not affect us because it is not about the units we ship, but the capacity,” Teh said.
Teh believes that annual storage shipments will grow 20 fold by capacity by 2020, which sounds quite optimistic. Desktops might not be the driving force behind hard drive sales, but other form factors and new devices should take their place.

Hard drives will not only get bigger, they will get smarter, too. Teh believes that over 85 percent of hard drives will eventually incorporate hybrid technology. In addition, SSD penetration in notebooks should hit 33 percent by 2016, with a CAGR of 162.4 percent between 2011 and 2016.

However, SSD remain prohibitively expensive and they won’t replace mechanical drives anytime soon. That is why Seagate and other hard drive makers are focusing on hybrid drives in the interim.

“Besides being impractical, a sudden surge in investment would likely plunge the semiconductor industry into a massive slump,” Teh said. “Our goal and strategy is to provide the broadest range of options for our customers, be it SSDs, hybrid or hard disk drives, based on their computing needs.”

Seagate reshuffles sales and marketing team

Posted on June 13, 2013 by - Moving People, News

seagate-longmontSeagate has announced a few changes in its sales and marketing team, most of which are centred on EMEA. The company said it reshuffled the team to address growth opportunities in cloud, SSD and branded storage markets.

Mark Whitby, Seagate’s vice president of EMEA Sales & Marketing and Global Channel Sales, said the changes will ensure that Seagate positions itself to address evolving market opportunities.

“The storage market is both growing and changing rapidly, and the changes we have made to our senior management team are intended to keep Seagate in the forefront of that market,” he said. “In particular, we want to take full advantage of the huge potential we see in areas such as cloud computing, solid state drives and in the market for branded storage solutions.”

In his expanded role as Vice President of EMEA Sales & Marketing and Global Channel Sales, Mark Whitby has now been charged responsibility for the company’s global distribution channel sales, developing and leading strategy and delivery of the business worldwide.

Joe Fagan is being appointed Senior Director of Cloud Initiatives, EMEA. In this newly created position he will be responsible for shaping Seagate’s Cloud strategy and engagement in the region.

Dimitri Galle has been appointed Senior Director of Sales and Marketing, Branded Products, EMEA. In his new position he will be responsible for sales and marketing of all Seagate-branded retail products across the region.

Bernd Breinbauer has been appointed to the newly created role of Director of EMEA SSD Sales with responsibility for developing sales of the company’s comprehensive solid state drive portfolio across the region. Seagate entered the highly competitive SSD market just a few weeks ago and Breinbauer obviously has a lot of work ahead.

Seagate clears out salesfolk

Posted on May 23, 2013 by - Moving People, News

seagate-longmontSeagate has shaken up its sales and marketing organisation in EMEA.

The company says that it has made the changes to ensure that it was “optimally positioned” to work with its customers to best address evolving market opportunities across the region. In particular, it wants to take full advantage of its potential in areas such as cloud computing, solid state drives and branded storage solutions.

Joe Fagan has been appointed senior director, Cloud Initiatives, EMEA. In this newly created position he will be responsible for shaping Seagate’s Cloud strategy and engagement in the region.

Fagan joins Seagate from UK storage distributor CMS Peripherals where he was responsible for shaping and delivering the company’s B2B and enterprise storage strategy Seagate said that here he developed and launched the company’s cloud initiative “Cloud Made Simple” in 2009.

He previously held EMEA-wide sales and marketing positions at Maxtor and Adaptec. Fagan will report to Mark Whitby, Seagate’s vice president of EMEA Sales & Marketing and Global Channel Sales.

Bernd Breinbauer has been appointed to the newly created role of director of EMEA SSD Sales with responsibility for developing sales of the company’s comprehensive solid state drive portfolio across the region. Breinbauer was previously sales director for Seagate’s Central Europe region and has also held positions in OEM sales management. Prior to joining Seagate, he worked with Hitachi.

Henk van den Berg, sales director, will take on leadership of Seagate’s Central Europe region in addition to his existing responsibility for Northern Europe in a new combined Northern and Central Europe region.

The company has also named Dimitri Galle as senior director of Sales and Marketing, Branded Products, EMEA. In his new position he will be responsible for sales and marketing of all Seagate-branded retail products across the region. He was previously senior manager, Sales and Marketing, for branded products in the central Europe region.

Separately, Mark Whitby, Seagate’s vice president of EMEA Sales and Marketing since 2009, has also been charged with responsibility for the company’s global distribution channel sales, developing and leading strategy and delivery of the business worldwide.

In his new role as vice president, EMEA Sales & Marketing and Global Channel Sales, Whitby leads a matrix team spread across sales, marketing, product management, pricing and finance to deliver on Seagate’s goals, as well as working to define longer term business planning.

Seagate shows off ultra quiet Video HDD

Posted on May 20, 2013 by - News

seagate-longmontSeagate has announced its Video 3.5 HDD, which it boasts is the industry’s first 4TB 3.5 inch HDD with digital video recorders, set top boxes and surveillance systems specifically in mind.

The Video 3.5 HDD was built for video, so it can store up to roughly 480 hours of HD content. This makes it a contender for satellite and cable providers as well as surveillance system builders, the company says, and is designed to deliver good performance in three key areas, those being high capacity and streaming capability, reliability, and acoustics.

Seagate’s drive can support up to 16 simultaneous HD streams or 20 standard definition streams, and can manage 24×7 operation capabilities.

Because the drive will be sitting in places where acoustics are crucial to limit other audible distractions, Seagate says this HDD lets designers manufacture the very quietest home entertainment systems. The company claims the Video 3.5 HDD is near silent and runs below the range of audible sound for the human ear – at 2.3 decibels – so it’ll only bother your dog.

Additionally, Seagate says this drive has a 0.55 percent annual failure rate which means it can be out in the field longer than the competition, as well as being made for low power consumption and heat emissions.

Seagate marketing veep Scott Horn said in a statement that the company’s experience in the video market has ultimately led to this product. “We’ve combined our knowledge on heat, acoustics and power to deliver what we believe to be the most reliable DVR drive in the world,” Horn said.

WD ships first 5mm 2.5-inch drives

Posted on May 16, 2013 by - News, Products

wd-ultraslimWestern Digital has started shipping the world’s first ultraslim 2.5-inch drives, designed specifically to meet the needs of Ultrabook vendors and makers of all things thin.

Measuring just 5mm at the waistline, WD’s new drives should enable even thinner devices, but as an added benefit they are quieter and more efficient than 7mm and 9.5mm drives. The new ultraslims also usher in a new era for WD, as they are the company’s first big foray into the hybrid drive market.

Seagate pioneered the hybrid drive market a couple of years ago with its Momentus XT series. It was only a matter of time before Western Digital entered the market and earlier this year they showed off their first SSHD designs. They were followed up by 5mm slim WD Black SSHD products. Mechanical 5mm drives will be marketed under the WD Blue brand. 

“With the launch of our new WD Blue 5 mm ultra slim hard drives and our WD Black SSHD products, currently shipping to OEMs, WD is delivering to our customers a variety of solutions that maximize storage capacity and volumetric efficiency, as well as performance and system responsiveness, for consumers,” said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD’s client computing business unit. “Our engineering team took a clean-sheet approach with 5 mm to deliver an ultra-thin hard drive that enables a world of possibilities and applications for mobile computing and beyond.”

Although SSDs are slowly emerging as the preferred choice for Ultrabooks and high performance notebooks, the medium range and low end are still dominated by traditional hard drives, with a few proprietary hybrid solutions here and there, usually found in budget ultrathins powered by AMD low voltage chips and a few cheap Intels. 

Hybrid drives offer substantial performance gains over traditional HDDs, at the fraction of the cost of proper SSDs. This is what is starting to make them increasingly appealing for system integrators and end-consumers alike.

Although Western Digital’s first 5mm are shipping to disties and OEMs as we speak, they are still available in a single capacity, 500GB. The mechanical WD Blue drive is priced at $89, but WD did not release the price of the WD Black hybrid unit.

The downside? WD’s ultraslims feature a new proprietary connector, as the standard SATA and DC plugs are simply too big for 5mm drives.

Demand for SSDs to stay strong

Posted on May 8, 2013 by - News, Opinions, Products

hdd-hugeAlthough the PC market has seen better days, shipments of solid state drives are expected to grow more than 600 percent by 2017, according to the latest figures released by IHS. However, even at this rate, two thirds of PCs shipped in 2017 will still have mechanical hard drives, although many of them will probably be hybrids. 

PC SSD shipments are expected to hit 227 million units in 2017, up from 31 million last year.

Hard drive shipments will drop to 410 million by 2017, down 14 percent from 475 million in 2012. In just five short years SSDs will claim 36 percent of the market, up from just six percent last year. HDDs will account for the remaining 64 percent, but memory makers stand to cash in from them as well, as hybrid drives hit the market in ever increasing numbers.

The driving force behind the SSD boom will be ultrabooks and other ultrathin devices. IHS analyst Fang Zhang believes ultrabooks and ultrathins, combined with touch screens and convertible form factors, will become very compelling machines, designed to lure consumers away from smartphones and tablets.

Of course, none of this is possible without more consumer interest. Although enthusiasts have been buying SSDs for years, the standard PC box buyer doesn’t care too much about the latest storage technology, which is still too pricey for mainstream adoption. Ultrabooks are slowly changing the public perception of SSDs are geeky devices for gamers and enthusiasts. Consumers are slowly starting to appreciate the added agility and responsiveness of SSD-based systems, and prices are tumbling as well.

On Tuesday Seagate announced its first series of SSD products designed to cover all market segments. The news was closely followed by an announcement from Western Digital and SadDisk, who will collaborate on new hybrid drives. Traditional HDD churners simply have to transition to SSDs and hybrid drives, it is just a matter of time.

“SSDs have dropped in price this year. The industry would probably put this down to supply and demand – but if I’m honest I think it’s all down to competition. Big players are moving in and really taking this industry to the next level – this week WD and Seagate separately announced their SSD push – and it wouldn’t surprise me if these larger players triggered a price war to push smaller players out of the market,” a reseller told us. “In terms of getting consumers more involved isn’t it just a case of making them a more prominent feature of gadgets and cost points? The average consumer just cares about what they can get and for how much.”

More marketing cash from the likes of Seagate and Western Digital will help, but so will tablets and smartphones. Consumer are already enjoying the perks of speedy solid state storage on their iPads and Androids, which means they are far more likely to go for an SSD based PC next time they upgrade. It is basically a case of not downgrading from a horse to a donkey, as Balkanese old wise men would say.

Seagate’s SSD push starts to take shape in Colorado

Posted on May 7, 2013 by - Gossip, News, Products

seagate-longmontHard drive maker Seagate is planning a big push into the solid-drive market and now it seems to be making its first move. The company is hosting a job fair in Longmont later this week and it is looking to hire about 150 people, mostly engineers. 

Seagate’s 1,250-strong Colorado Design Centre is based in Longmont and it seems it will lead Seagate’s SSD push. Gary Gentry, Seagate VP and general manager of the company’s SSD business, said his client SSD team will be headquartered in Longmont. 

“We already have a substantial group and we’re expanding the technology, the product and the business development here in Longmont,” he told Timescall.com.

Seagate’s new 600-series SSDs will be marketed to consumers and OEMs alike, marking a new era in the company’s history. The drives will be available in multiple capacities up to 480GB and they will fit standard hard drive bays, which means we are probably looking at 2.5-inch 7mm units. In addition, Seagate also plans to develop a series of business oriented SSDs at Longmont.

This won’t be the first time Longmont dabbled in flash. The centre was instrumental in the development of Seagate’s hybrid drives (SSHDs) a couple of years ago. It got the job done and Seagate was the first hard drive market to successfully introduce 2.5-inch hybrids. Earlier this year it upgraded and expanded its SSHD offer.

Seagate VP and management lead for the centre Jeff Mason said his team is also developing drives specifically designed to suit the needs of large-scale cloud storage systems. He said the job fair is Seagate’s biggest recruitment in a decade and said the hiring will occur throughout the year.

Although Seagate is betting big on SSDs, it won’t leave the traditional HDD market anytime soon.

“There’s not enough SSD production in the world to replace the amount of storage that magnetic storage devices provide,” said Mason.

Mason pointed out that mobile devices are not a “displacer” for mechanical storage, but rather a stimulant, as mobile devices tend to rely on cloud storage, which is still largely based on mechanical drives.

Seagate revamps SSHD line-up

Posted on March 6, 2013 by - News, Products

seagate-hddSeagate recently announced that it will phase out 7200rpm laptop drives by the end of the year and now we know what it will use to replace them. The company announced its third generation solid state hybrid drives, or SSHDs, and for the first time it is bringing NAND cache to desktop drives as well.

Seagate’s venerable 7200rpm laptop drives will be replaced by two new SSHDs, in 500GB and 1TB capacities. Both feature 8GB of NAND, double the 4GB used in first and second generation Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives. They are 7mm thick and Seagate claims the new drives are up to 40 percent faster than its previous SSHD generations. Better yet, they are up to five times as fast as 5400rpm mechanical drives.

Seagate’s vice president of marketing Scott Horn likened the new drives to adding a turbo charger to a PC and he added that the drives will come cheap, much cheaper than proper SSDs. The 500GB is priced at $79, while the 1TB variant costs $99.

However, Seagate’s decision to bring SSDH technology to mid-range desktop drives is perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement. Seagate will sell 1TB and 2TB desktop hybrid drives for $99 and $149 respectively. Although the prices sound a tad too high, 3.5-inch hybrids should have no trouble attracting plenty of takers.

They will allow OEMs to come stick them into very cheap desktops, greatly improving performance and reducing the storage bottleneck which plagues most PCs. The speed of solid state drives increases with each new generation, which is not the case with HDDs. However, SSDs are still too expensive to be used in most desktops. Decent hybrid drives with a reasonable price tag can bring the best of both worlds to boring entry level desktops and they can easily become a big selling point for vendors.

Seagate to phase out 7200rpm notebook drives this year

Posted on March 4, 2013 by - News, Products

seagate-hddSeagate is planning to kill off 7200rpm notebook hard drives by the end of the year, but the decision is raising quite a few questions, and eyebrows.

Ultrabooks and high end notebooks have already shifted to SSDs, or in some cases hybrid drives, hence Seagate’s decision should come as no surprise. Traditional 7200rpm drives tend to generate quite a bit of heat and they need a lot more power than SSDs, so they’re anything but an ideal choice for thin and light notebooks.

David Burks, Seagate’s director of marketing and product management, told X-bit Labs that the company will stop building 7200rpm notebook drives “at the end of 2013”. Seagate already offers a range of hybrid 2.5-inch drives to OEMs and retailers, but it is expected to refresh its lineup later this year. The phase out should coincide with the introduction of next generation Seagate hybrid drives.

Western Digital recently showcased its first 2.5-inch hybrids, with a lot more NAND cache than Seagate Momentus XT series hybrid drives, but neither company has made a serious effort to enter the SSD market, which is overcrowded as it is.

However, although Seagate will stop producing 7200rpm notebook drives this year, they will probably be on the market for the better part of 2014. Since Western Digital is a relative newcomer to the hybrid market, it might keep building 7200rpm drives a bit longer, although it is more than likely that WD will drop 7200rpm drives in favour of hybrids as well.

Hard drive prices slowly returning to pre-flood levels

Posted on January 25, 2013 by - News, Opinions, Products

hddcloseupThe hard drive industry was hit hard by heavy flooding in Thailand back in 2011. Several plants, providing vital components for Seagate and Western Digital, temporarily went off line following the disaster. The shortage caused a massive surge in hard drive prices and its effects are still being felt.

Keen to provide a bit of perspective, Xbit Labs compiled an interesting chart of hard drive average selling prices, based on data from Seagate’s and Western Digital’s SEC filings over the last four years. Pre-flood average selling prices (ASPs) were between $45 and $55, but they soared to the $70 mark in Q4 2011. The recovery was painfully slow and although some rather optimistic analysts claimed the market would stabilize by mid-2012, we are still feeling the muddy aftertaste of Thai flood water.

According to the latest figures, average selling prices decreased to $62 – $63 per unit and they are still considerably higher than pre-flood prices. Prices are currently at 2008 levels, which means they are still too high for comfort. Of course, the effects of the global economic downturn and recent PC slump were not factored into 2008 pricing and ASPs should be significantly lower today, even after they are adjusted for inflation.
This is bad for consumers and system integrators alike, as they have to adjust their own margins to compensate for the higher prices.  What’s more, hard drive makers are probably not too keen to reduce their ASPs, as further cuts would negatively impact their margins while they are still reeling from flood-related losses. Western Digital CEO Stephen Milligan confirmed the company has more capacity, but it is throttling it to what it sees as demand, which is a polite way of saying WD is trying to keep prices artificially high.

It is even worse for end consumers looking to upgrade their PCs or get some cheap portable storage. Back in mid-2011, per-terabyte retail prices were at their lowest point, about €25 in European markets and a 2TB 3.5-inch drive cost roughly €50. By November 2011, per-terabyte prices hit €35 to €38 and they went on to peak at €50 to €55 by April 2012. Retail prices today are still significantly higher than in 2011 and they are in the €38 to €40 range across Europe.

Xbit also concluded that ASPs peaked in Q4 2011. In the meantime, SSD prices continued to tumble, but SSDs are still too costly to completely replace traditional hard drives. However, SSD shipments are expected to double in 2013, as they are the preferred storage option for Ultrabooks.

Hybrid drives are also entering the fray and they can be found in quite a few budget ultrathin notebooks, although their days in proper Ultrabooks are numbered. So far Seagate is the only hard drive maker to offer 2.5-inch hybrid drives in retail, but Western Digital is also entering the market and it showed off its first consumer friendly hybrid drives at CES.

Traditional hard drives are not going anywhere yet and it is evident that WD and Seagate have enough room to maintain a huge price advantage over SSDs, as they are artificially inflating prices. They can’t bridge the performance and power consumption gap, but by offering hybrid drives they can bring the best of both worlds to value-minded consumers.