Seagate explains about the surge in storage consumption, gaming SSDs and more.
During the pandemic, we understood the importance of our PCs and storage devices. Also, many of the people who wanted to build a gaming PC took this as an opportunity to finally fulfil their dream. In all this time, you must have heard about SSDs and if you did then you would have also heard about the brand Seagate. We wanted to get an outlook on how SSDs have been gaining attention and how the pandemic increased demand for them. So, we took our questions to Mr Sameer Bhatia, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Seagate Technology.
What about growth in storage devices and the increasing demand of SSDs?
SSDs have been gaining a lot of attention these days and I wanted to know what is driving this growth. Sameer suggests that “the surge in storage consumption is being driven not only by the growth of content and use within the enterprise but also by new applications and devices that directly or indirectly consume enterprise storage.”
With the demand being so huge, Seagate will surely feel some competition and I was wondering how are they planning to grow in this segment in the coming years. As Sameer told in the interview, Seagate has been dominating the SSD line with SAS and NVMe SSDs focused on gaming and on enterprise applications. The company has added the NVMe platform recently.
Sameer further explained, “HDD and SSD will be maintaining a synergy with HDD’s strength in the economic value in terms of cost per unit, while SSD balances the intrinsic performance capability, both which carve out a significant role in the overall data storage landscape. Hard drives provide that economic value for the bulk of the data store that are stored in the in the data center, and SSDs complements the performance to access that data through data tearing and data caching.”
As for the demand for SSDs, Bhatia said, “Driven by the massive surge in data volume and proliferation of connected devices, over the next two years, enterprise data will grow at 42.2% annual rate globally, and 45.2% in India indicating significant growth in the data storage market in the time to come.”
He further added, “Like the HDD market, demand for SSDs continues to benefit from work- or school-from-home, and entertainment (livestreaming and gaming) trends that have boosted demand for storage drives. Signals from IoT devices, and metadata, entertainment-related data is growing at a faster rate than most other regions, expanding at a rate of 23% compared with a global average of 20% until 2025.”
What should you look for when buying a new storage device?
According to Sameer, if you are looking for a new hard drive or SSD for your PC, you should definitely keep the following points in mind.
Form factor - Without any moving parts, SSDs are the thinnest of all available storage options. They're especially good for thin and light PCs and more complicated, industrial designs. For standard notebooks, SSDs are available in 7 mm heights. HDDs are available in standard 7 mm and 15mm designs.
Capacity - Hard drives are workhorses when it comes to capacity. The storage size of hard drives is exponentially larger than solid state drives, and current capacities for consumer hard drives — now reaching up to 16 TB — and enterprise HDDs – currently shipping out 20TB, are anticipated to continue growing.
Speed - SSDs provide peak performance for booting and high read/write performance for computing that requires enhanced multitasking capabilities; HDDs provide ample capacity for PC, NAS, and enterprise platforms available today.
Price - Low-capacity SSDs can be affordable in the 250 GB to 1TB range. While high-capacity SSDs can cost more when measured by cost per gigabyte, HDDs provide the lowest cost per gigabyte and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Reliability - Failure rates on SSD and HDD technologies have very similar ratings. Drives are considered extremely reliable by looking out for their Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
Durability - Solid state drives can be durable due to their design to perform under heavy use. Durability is delivered through the measurement of Total Terabytes Written (TTW). Without moving parts, they can withstand higher extremes of shock, drop and temperature. Seagate’s latest FireCuda 530 Gen4 PCIe NVMe SSD has up to 5,100TB TTW that boost performance under heavy use and is tough enough to go the distance with.
SSDs vs HDDs: Which holds a better market share?
If SSDs are fast and more reliable, anyone would think that SSDs hold a larger market share than their HDD counterparts. However, that is not the case. Bhatia explains, “The HDD market crossed an impressive threshold - Seagate just became the first data storage company ever to have shipped 3 zettabytes of hard drive storage capacity, surpassing that milestone in March 2021. That’s the equivalent to holding 30 billion 4K movies — that’s so much cinema it’d take 5.4 million years to watch it! Or 60 billion video games — enough to let you enjoy nonstop gameplay for 86,700 lifetimes! The HDD industry's number of exabytes shipped annually continues to grow. Last year, it surpassed the historic milestone of 1ZB in 2020 (as projected by IDC and verified by TRENDFOCUS and Seagate).”
He also added, “Economics of SSD vs HDD are going to stay roughly in equilibrium, and the architectures that we see today are going to be the preferred architectures for the next five or 10 years - there will be a robust mix of approximately 90% on disk and 10% on flash for compute, at cloud service providers and in the exabyte-scale data centers, according to IDC. Thus, the two storage mediums have a symbiotic relationship, will continue to co-exist. Today, businesses cannot scale a storage system without both - each has a unique value proposition. Through marrying those unique value propositions that HDDs and SSDs offer can enterprises all benefit from the massive data centre created. The only way to accommodate the proliferating mass data is for cloud providers to carefully balance flash storage and HDDs.”
What is the roadmap of Seagate?
When asked about the future roadmap of the company, Bhatia said, “Seagate’s engineering team has developed HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) as the next major step to enable higher-capacity hard drives. HAMR uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically and thermally stable. According to the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC), HAMR is the next significant storage technology innovation to increase the amount of data storage in the area available to store data — known as the disk’s “areal density.” This boost in areal density will help fuel hard drive product development and growth through the next decade.”
He also said, “We have also developed the MACH.2 Multi-Actuator Hard Drives that doubles hard drive performance for data-intensive applications and enables enhanced performance capability. MACH.2 is the world’s first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently and solves the need for increased performance. By allowing the data centre host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive. With MACH.2, hyperscale data centers can access performance gains without sacrificing capacity or TCO.”
What about the gaming side?
While we got a lot of insights about the storage industry, we were also keen to know a little more about the gaming side. Not just Seagate, but every brand sells an SSD or HDD that is focused on the gamers. Bhatia claims that these SSDs are “designed and built specifically keeping in mind the dynamic needs of professional-level gamers – speed, endurance, and capacity. SSDs not only deliver durable speed for the long haul, but also provides fast PC gaming storage speeds so gamers spend less time loading levels and maps, fewer seconds respawning, and reduce stuttering in open-world gaming.”
The company’s newest offering, the Firecuda FC 530 gaming SSD “offers gamers the latest PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD technology and the fastest performance from the company’s line of PC gaming storage products – bringing speed, endurance, and high capacity to the peak of PC performance. Delivering sequential read speeds of up to 7300 MB/s, the FireCuda 530 catalyzes PCIe Gen4 power with transfer rates up to two times faster than PCIe Gen3 SSDs and 12 times faster than SATA-based SSDs.”
There is also a heatsink version of the FireCuda 530, which is supported on the PS5 and it comes with a “minimalist design, anodized aluminium body and micropore texture to improve heat transfer and support lower SSD temperatures, making it efficient for heat management and maintaining drive performance for longer periods of time. It is specially designed by EKWB that swaps out cooling fins for a more massive, high-grade aluminium block with a finely textured finish, maximizing cooling.”
