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Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce.

According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD prices will rise by 5% to 10% in Q2 2024 alone and could increase further as a reault of the ongoing challenges faced by the storage industry.

The primary driver behind Seagate's decision is increased demand for high-capacity HDDs, which are used to train AI models. This demand spike, coupled with a reduction in production output from hard drive makers, has created a significant supply-demand imbalance. As a result, Seagate has decided to adjust their pricing strategy to manage the situation. Further exacerbating the issue are global inflationary pressures which continue to inflate costs across the board, which also contributed to the company's decision to increase prices, Seagate said in a message to clients published by TrendForce.

Seagate emphasized that its reduced production capacity has been a major challenge, hindering the company's ability to fulfill customer demands fully and promptly.

"As a result, we will be implementing price increases effective immediately on new orders and for demand that is over and above previously committed volumes," the alleged memo from Seagate reads. "Supply constraints are expected to continue and as such we anticipate that prices will continue to increase in the coming quarters."

Earlier this month Western Digital also informed its customers about price hikes for its HDD and SSD products. This notification was based on similar issues — higher than anticipated demand across the whole product range and additional supply chain challenges affecting the electronics sector. Western Digital's announcement made it clear that these disruptions are likely to continue, prompting further price adjustments.

Sources: TrendForce, TrendForce, TechNews

As Seagate ramps up shipments of its new heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)-based Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, the company is both in the enviable position of shipping the first major new hard drive technology in a decade, and the much less enviable position of proving the reliability of the first major new hard drive technology in a decade. Due to HAMR's use of temporal heating with its platters, as well as all-new read/write heads, HAMR introduces multiple new changes at once that have raise questions about how reliable the technology will be. Looking to address these matters (and further promote their HAMR drives), Seagate has published a fresh blog post outlining the company's R&D efforts, and why the company expects their HAMR drives to last several years – as long or longer than current PMR hard drives.

According to the company, the reliability of Mozaic 3+ drives on par with traditional drives relying on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), the company says. In fact, components of HAMR HDDs have demonstrated a 50% increase in reliability over the past two years. Seagate says that Mozaic 3+ drives boast impressive durability metrics: their read/write heads have demonstrated capacity to handle over 3.2 petabytes of data transfer over 6,000 hours of operation, which exceeds data transfers of typical nearline hard drives by 20 times. Accordingly, Seagate is rating these drives for a mean time between failure (MTBF) 2.5 million hours, which is in-line with PMR-based drives.

Based on their field stress tests, involving over 500,000 Mozaic 3+ drives, Seagate says that the heads of Mozaic 3+ drives will last over seven years, surpassing the typical lifespan of current PMR-based drives. Generally, customers anticipate that modern PMR drives will last between four and five years with average usage, so these drives would exceed current expectations.

Altogether, Seagate is continuing aim for a seamless transition from PMR to HAMR drives in customer systems. That means ensuring that these new drives can fit into existing data center infrastructures without requiring any changes to enterprise specifications, warranty conditions, or form factors.

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar SL500 Portable SSD is one of the moderately priced 20 Gbps PSSDs in that set.

The SL500 is able to achieve its price point thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. The unique aspect is the use of YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in previous SM2320-based PSSDs). Read on for a detailed look at the SL500, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

SK hynix is one of the few vertically integrated manufacturers in the flash-based storage market. The company is well-established in the OEM market. A few years back, they also started exploring direct end-user products. Internal SSDs (starting with the Gold S31 and Gold P31) were the first out of the door. Late last year, the company introduced the Beetle X31 portable SSD, its first direct-attached storage product. In February, a complementary product was introduced - the Tube T31 Stick SSD.

The Beetle X31 is a portable SSD with a Type-C upstream port and a separate cable. The Tube T31 is a take on the traditional thumb drive with a male Type-A interface. The size of the Beetle X31 makes the use of a bridge solution obvious. Our investigation into the Tube T31 also revealed the use of the same internal SSD, albeit with a different bridge. Read on for a detailed look at the Tube T31, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

Western Digital this week is previewing the industry's first 4 TB SD card. The device is being showcased at the NAB trade show for broadcasters and content creators and will be released commercially in 2025.

Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card complies with the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity standard (SDUC, which enables up to 128TB). The card uses the Ultra High Speed-I (UHS-I) interface and is rated for speed Class 10, therefore supporting a minimum speed of 10 MB/s and a maximum data transfer rate of 104 MB/s when working in UHS104 (SDR104) mode (there is a catch about performance, but more on that later). WD's SD card is also rated to meet Video Speed Class V30, supporting a minimal sequential write speed of 30 MB/s, which is believed to be good enough for 8K video recording, above and beyond the 4K video market that Western Digital is primarily aiming the forthcoming card at.

For now, Western Digital is not disclosing what NAND is in the SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card. Given the high capacity and relatively distant 2025 release date, WD may be targetting this as one of their first products to use their forthcoming BiCS 9 NAND.

And while not listed in WD's official press release, we would be surprised if the forthcoming card didn't also support the off-spec DDR200/DDR208 mode, which allows for higher transfer rates than the UHS-I standard normally allows via double data rate signaling. Western Digital's current-generation SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC 1 TB SD card already supports that mode, allowing it to reach read speeds as high as 170 MB/s, so it would be surprising to see the company drop it from newer products. That said, the catch with DDR208 remains the same as always: it's a proprietary mode that requires a compatible host to make use of.

Western Digital has not disclosed how much will its SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card cost. A 1 TB SanDisk Extreme Pro card costs $140, so one can make guesses about the price of a 4 TB SD card that uses cutting-edge NAND.

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Nowadays highest-capacity hard drives are typically aimed at cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises, but this does not mean that creative professionals or regular users do not need them. To cater to demands of more regular consumers, Western Digital has started shipments of its Red Pro 24 TB HDDs, which are aimed at high-end NAS use for creative professionals with significant storage requirements.

Western Digital's Red Pro 24 TB hard drives come approximately 20 months after their 22 TB model hit retail in 2022, offering an incremental improvement to WD's highest-capacity NAS and consumer hard drive offering. The platform uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR), feature a 7200 RPM rotating speed, are equipped with a 512 MB cache, and use OptiNAND technology to improve reliability as well as optimize performance and power consumption. The HDDs are rated for an up to 287 MB/s media to cache transfer rate, which makes them some of the fastest hard drives around (albeit, still a bit slower compared to CSP and enterprise-oriented HDDs).

Just like other high-end network-attached storage-aimed HDDs, the Red Pro 24 TB hard drives use helium-filled platforms that are very similar to those designed for enterprise drives. Consequently, the Red Pro 24 TB HDD are equipped with rotation vibration sensors to anticipate and proactively counteract disturbances caused by increased vibration and multi-axis shock sensors to detect subtle shock events and automatically offset them with dynamic fly height technology to ensure that heads to not scratch disks.

UPDATE 4/2/2024: Western Digital has notified us that WD Red Pro fully support ArmorCache capability, even though it is not listed in datasheets.

What these drives lack compared Apparently, just like WD Gold and Ultraster 22 TB and 24 TB drives for enterprises and cloud datacenters, WD Red Pro HDDs fully support the ArmorCache feature that provides protection against power loss when write-cache is enabled (WCE mode) and enhances performance when write-cache is disabled (WCD mode).

On the reliability side of matters, Western Digital's Red Pro 24 TB HDDs are designed for 24/7 operation in vibrating environments, such as enterprise-grade NAS with loads of bays, and are rated for up to 550 TB/year workloads as well as up to 600,000 load/unload cycles, which is in line with what Western Digital's WD Gold and Ultrastar hard drives offer.

As for power consumption, the WD Red Pro 24 TB consumes up to 6.4W during read and write operations, up to 3.9W in idle mode, and up to 1.2W in standby/sleep mode.

Western Digital's Red Pro 24 TB (WD240KFGX) HDDs are now shipping to resellers as well as NAS makers, and are slated to be available shortly. Expect these hard drives to be slightly cheaper than the WD Gold 24 TB model.

SK hynix is set to unveil their first Gen5 consumer NVMe SSD lineup shortly, based on the products at display in their GTC 2024 booth. The Platinum P51 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD will take over flagship duties from the Platinum P41 that has been serving the market for more than a year.

Similar to the Gold P31 and the Platinum P41, the Platinum P51 also uses an in-house SSD controller. The key updates are the move to PCIe Gen5 and the use of SK hynix's 238L TLC NAND. Other details are scarce, and we have reached out for additional information.

Only the peak sequential access numbers were available at the GTC booth, indicating that the drive's firmware is still undergoing tweaks. It is also unclear how these numbers are going to vary based on capacity. Availability and pricing are also not public yet.

This is a significant launch for the Gen5 consumer SSD market, where the number of available options are quite limited. The Phison E26 controller and Micron's B58R NAND combination is already in its second generation (with the NAND operating at 2400 MT/s in the newest avatar), but other vertically integrated vendors such as Samsung, Western Digital / Kioxia, and SK hynix (till now) are focusing more on the Gen4 market which has much higher adoption.

We will update the piece with additional information once the specifications are officially available.

The DNA Data Storage Alliance introduced its inaugural specifications for DNA-based data storage this week. This specification outlines a method for encoding essential information within a DNA data archive, crucial for developing and commercializing an interoperable storage ecosystem.

DNA data storage uses short strings of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) called oligonucleotides (oligos) mixed together without a specific physical ordering scheme. This storage media lacks a dedicated controller and an organizational means to understand the proximity of one media subcomponent to another. DNA storage differs significantly from traditional media like tape, HDD, and SSD, which have fixed structures and controllers that can read and write data from the structured media. DNA's lack of physical structure requires a unique approach to initiate data retrieval, which brings its peculiarities regarding standardization. 

To address this, the SNIA DNA Archive Rosetta Stone (DARS) working group, part of the DNA Data Storage Alliance, has developed two specifications, Sector Zero and Sector One, to facilitate the process of starting a DNA archive. 

Sector Zero serves as the starting point, providing minimal details necessary for the archive reader to identify the entity responsible for synthesizing the DNA (e.g., Dell, Microsoft, Twist Bioscience) and the CODEC used for encoding Sector One (e.g., Super Codec, Hyper Codec, Jimbob's Codec). Sector Zero consists of 70 bases: the first 35 bases identify the vendor, and the second 35 bases identify the codec. The information in Sector Zero enables access and decoding of data stored in Sector One. The amount of data stored in SZ is small and fits into a single oligonucleotide.

Sector One expands on this by including a description of the contents, a file table, and parameters required for transferring data to a sequencer. This specification ensures that the main body of the archive is accessible and readable, paving the way for data retrieval. Sector One contains exactly 150 bases and will span multiple oligonucleotides. 

"A key goal of the DNA Data Storage Alliance is to set and publish specifications and standards that allow an interoperable DNA data storage ecosystem to grow," said Dave Landsman, of the DNA Data Storage Alliance Board of Directors. "With the publishing of the Alliance's first specifications, we take an important step in achieving that goal. Sector Zero and Sector One are now publicly available, allowing companies working in the space to adopt and implement."

The DNA Data Storage Alliance is led by Catalog Technologies, Inc., Quantum Corporation, Twist Bioscience Corporation, and Western Digital (though we are unsure whether Western Digital's NAND or HDD division is responsible for developing the specification). Meanwhile, numerous industry giants, including Microsoft, support the DNA Data Storage Alliance.

Source: SNIA

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Once the domain of external, bus-powered hard drives, these days the market for external storage has been almost completely consumed by portable SSDs. Rapid technological advancements in NAND flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND) has allowed their capacity to eclipse 2.5-inch HDDs, all the while multiple improvements in host interface speeds (such as the move from USB 2.0 to 3.0, and onwards to 3.2 Gen 2 / Gen 2x2 / USB4) has made portable SSDs faster and more reliable than the hard drives they replace. All of which has helped to make portable SSDs the go-to solution for external storage, both big and small.

For our latest storage buyer's guide, we've rounded up some of the best portable SSDs we've looked at in the past couple of years. What's hot, what's not, and what's a good deal while still offering reasonable performance? We break that down and make our picks for the best portable SSDs on the market today.

Western Digital had unveiled the SanDisk Professional PRO-BLADE modular SSD ecosystem in mid-2022 to serve the needs of the professional market. Compact and sturdy NVMe drives (PRO-BLADE SSD Mag) swappable across discrete bus-powered enclosures (PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT), and also compatible with a multi-bay reader (PRO-BLADE STATION) have perfectly fit the requirements of multi-user / multi-site workflows in the content capture industry. Read on for a detailed look at the first-generation PRO-BLADE SSD Mags and the PRO-BLADE TRANSPORT enclosure. In addition to the evaluation of the performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile, an analysis of the internals is also included.

Now well in the midst of executing its plan to divide itself into separate hard drive and NAND businesses, Western Digital today offered a fresh update on the state of that split, and what the next steps are for the company. With the eventual goal of dividing the company into two independent, publicly traded companies, Western Digital is reporting that they have made significant progress in key transactional projects, and they are also announcing their initial leadership appointments for the post-separation businesses.

Western Digital's separation, announced on October 30, 2023, aims to create two focused companies with distinct product lineups for hard drives and NAND flash memory, respectively, as well as NAND flash memory-based products. This move is expected to speed up innovation and introduce new growth opportunities, according to Western Digital. Meanwhile, with separate capital structures, operational efficiency of the two entities will be higher compared to the united company, the management of Western Digital claims.

Western Digital led the storage industry's consolidation by acquiring HGST, various SSD and flash companies in the early 2010s, and SanDisk in 2016 for NAND flash production. As a result, in late 2010s the company become a media-agnostic, vertically-integrated storage technology company. However, the company faced challenges in growing its revenue. The 3D NAND and SSD markets are highly competitive commodity markets, and as a result they tend to fluctate depending on supply and demand. Meanwhile, demand for HDDs is declining and offseting decreasing unit sales with 3D NAND-based products and nearline hard drives was challenging. Meanwhile, to avoid avoid competition with larger storage solutions providers like Dell, HPE, and IBM — which purchase Western Digital's HDDs, SSDs, and NAND memory — Western Digital had to divest its storage solutions, which presents additional challenges.

As a result, Western Digital's HDD and NAND businesses have acted largely independently since late 2020, when it became apparent that the combined company has failed to become bigger than the sum of Western Digital and SanDisk parts. So far, quite some progress has been made in preparing for the separation, including establishing legal entities in 18 countries, preparing independent financial models, and finalizing preparations for regulatory filings. As a result, the company remains on track to finish the split in the second-half of this year, according to Western Digital.

With regards to post-split leadership, David Goeckeler has been appointed as the chief executive designate for the NAND flash memory spinoff company. He expressed enthusiasm for the NAND business's potential in market growth and the development of new memory technologies.

"Today's announcement highlights the important steps we are making towards the completion of an extremely complex transaction that incorporates over a dozen countries and spans data storage technology brands for consumers to professional content creators to the world’s leading device OEMs and the largest cloud providers," said David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital. "I am pleased with the exceptional work the separation teams have done so far in creating a spin-ready foundation that will ensure a successful transition to independent, market-leading companies for our Flash and HDD businesses."

Meanwhile, Irving Tan, currently executive vice president of global operations, will assume the CEO role for the standalone HDD company, which will continue to operate under the Western Digital brand. It is unclear where Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, currently the head of WDC's HDD business unit, will end up, or if he'll even remain with the company at all.

"While both Western Digital's businesses will have the strategic focus and resources to pursue exciting opportunities in their respective markets once the separation is complete, the Flash business offers exciting possibilities with market growth potential and the emerging development of disruptive, new memory technologies," added Goeckeler. "I am definitely looking forward to what's next for the spinoff team."

Silicon Power announced the MS70 and PX10 Portable SSDs in late 2023. The company is well known for offering entry- and mid-range products at compelling price points, but the two products came with plenty of promises in the 1GBps-class category. The MS70 promised high storage density (up to 2TB in a compact thumb drive), while the PX10 targeted power users and professionals with performance consistency as the focus. Read on for a detailed look at the Silicon Power PX10 including an analysis of its internals, value proposition, and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

Crucial is unveiling the latest addition to its Gen5 consumer NVMe SSD lineup today - the T705 PCIe 5.0 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. It takes over flagship duties from the Crucial T700 released last year. The company has been putting focus on the high-end consumer SSD segment in the last few quarters. The T700 was one of the first to offer more than 12 GBps read speeds, and the T705 being launched today is one of the first drives available for purchase in the 14+ GBps read speeds category.

The Crucial T705 utilizes the same platform as the T700 from last year - Phison's E26 controller with Micron's B58R 232L 3D TLC NAND. The key difference is the B58R NAND operating at 2400 MT/s in the new T705 (compared to the 2000 MT/s in the T700). Micron's 232L NAND process has now matured enough for the company to put out 2400 MT/s versions with enough margins. Similar to the T700, this drive is targeted towards gamers, content creators, and professional users as well as data-heavy AI use-cases.

The move to 2400 MT/s NAND has allowed Crucial to claim an increase in the performance of the drive in all four corners - up to 20% faster random writes, and 18% higher sequential reads. Additionally, Crucial also claims more bandwidth in a similar power window for the new drive.

The T705 is launching in three capacities - 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Both heatsink and non-heatsink versions are available. Crucial is also offering a white heatsink limited edition for the 2TB version. This caters to users with white-themed motherboards that are increasingly gaining market presence.

Phison has been pushing DirectStorage optimizations in its high-end controllers, and it is no surprise that the T705 advertises the use of Phison's 'I/O+ Technology' to appeal to gamers. Given its high-performance nature, it is no surprise that the E26 controller needs to be equipped with DRAM for managing the flash translation layer (FTL). Crucial is using Micron LPDDR4 DRAM (1GB / TB of flash) in the T705 for this purpose.

Crucial is confident that the supplied passive heatsink is enough to keep the T705 from heavy throttling under extended use. The firmware throttling kicks in at 81C and protective shutdown at 90C. Flash pricing is not quite as low as it was last year, and the 2400 MT/s flash allows Micron / Crucial to place a premium on the product. At the 4TB capacity point, the drive can be purchased for as low as 18¢/GB, but the traditional 1TB and 2TB ones go for 20 - 26 ¢/GB depending on the heatsink option.

There are a number of Gen5 consumer SSDs slated to appear in the market over the next few months using the same 2400 MT/s B58R 3D TLC NAND and Phison's E26 controller (Sabrent's Rocket 5 is one such drive). The Crucial / Micron vertical integration on the NAND front may offer some advantage for the T705 when it comes to the pricing aspect against such SSDs. That said, the Gen5 consumer SSD market is still in its infancy with only one mass market (Phison E26) controller in the picture. The rise in consumer demand for these high-performance SSDs may coincide with other vendors such as Innogrit (with their IG5666) and Silicon Motion (with their SM2508) gaining traction. Currently, Crucial / Micron (with their Phison partnership) is the only Tier-1 vendor with a high-performance consumer Gen5 SSD portfolio, and the T705 cements their leadership position in the category further.