Tag: HDD

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.

Hard drive market shrinks, again

Posted on April 3, 2013 by - News, Opinions

hdd-hugeEuropean outfits don’t seem to be gobbling up nearly as many hard drives as they should. According to consultancy firm Futuresource, shipments have gone from bad to worse over the past two years.

The total capacity purchased last year dropped year-on-year for the first time in history and there are no signs of recovery yet.

A multitude of factors contributed to the slump. The disastrous Thailand floods in 2011 pushed prices up for several consecutive quarters, and just as supply started to improve, the tablet craze and PC slump hit hard, compounded by the ever increasing popularity of cloud services. The fact that SSD prices are tumbling did not help, either. Hard drive shipments peaked in 2010, with 28.1 million units, but they dropped to 25.9 million in 2011 and 21.5 million in 2012.

Mats Larsson, senior market analyst for Futuresource, told The Guardian that he doesn’t expect the market to recover to 2010 levels anytime soon.

“We think this year shipments will show between 5% to 10% growth – likely about 7%,” Larsson said. So although some growth is expected, it’s not nearly enough to come close to 2010 levels.

The other issue is the size of drives purchased last year. While it is still growing, it is not keeping up with the drop in unit sales. As a result, the total capacity dropped from 25.4 petabytes in 2011 to 23.6 petabytes in 2012.

Larsson said some retailers held back on buying drives last year, in the hope that distributors would drop prices. That didn’t happen. Hopes that increased demand for tablets would result in higher NAS shipments were also quashed. Shipments of NAS systems in 2012 dropped to 1.12 million units, down from 1.27 million units in 2011.

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.

 

New generation Intel ultrabooks set to drive SSD growth this year

Posted on January 24, 2013 by - News, Products

ssdA new wave of low-cost and attractive Ultrabooks could help double shipments of solid-state drives (SSDs) this year, IHS iSuppli has said.

According to the analyst company’s Storage Space Market Brief worldwide SSD shipments are set to rise to 83 million units this year, up from 39 million in 2012.

Shipments are set to continue to rise 239 million units in 2016, which the company said amounted to around 40 percent of the size of the hard disk drive (HDD) market.

SSDs can serve as an alternative to hard disk drives in personal computers and work by storing data using NAND flash memory semiconductors rather than through traditional rotating media.

In its report, IHS looked at traditional solid state drives in both the consumer and enterprise segments, as well as cache SSDs that along with an HDD component make up a composite storage products such as those found in Intel’s Ultrabooks.

The company said that Ultrabooks had played a part in the slump of SSDs last year. It said that despite SSD shipments rising by 124 percent, growth  had fallen short of expectations because sales faltered – due to poor marketing, high prices and a lack of appealing features.

It said the future depended on the new generation of Ultrabooks, which if, as predicted, take off this year, will see the SSD market growing at robust levels.

Intel, which has been plagued by poor Ultrabook sales despite all of its bluster, is still trying to break into the market, introducing a new range loaded with Windows 8 and Haswell microprocessor architecture.

However, other factors are also involved when it comes to the SSD market, with IHS pointing out that average selling prices for NAND flash memory have come down, in the process establishing new price expectations.

The lower prices are attracting deal-seeking consumer enthusiasts, as well as an increasing number of PC manufacturers that are now more willing to install the once-costly drives into computers.

Over in the enterprise sector, SSD use is also growing as a result of product introductions from major vendors and startups.