In this article we look at recent announcements by Seagate for conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs with up to 28TB of digital storage capacity. We also look at recent projections by TrendForce that indicate DRAM and NAND prices could begin to rise in the fourth quarter of 2023. All storage and memory devices (including HDDs and SSDs) have experienced significant declines in prices since mid-2022 and positive signs point to the promise of higher storage capacity demand to meet growing needs.
Seagate recently announced its highest density conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for data center applications with 24TB. The Exos X24 HDDs have 10 disks with a per disk storage capacity of 2.4TB. The company also said that it would offer shingled magnetic recording (SMR) Exox X24 configurations with storage capacities up to 28TB. The Exos X24 is a 3.5-inch helium filled 7,200 RPM nearline HDD offered in both SATA and SAS interfaces and with an enhanced caching scheme that can perform three times better than solutions with on read or write caching.
The product has a sustained data rate of up to 285 MB/s and is rated at 2.5M-hours between failures (MTBF). It includes Seagate’s Secure encryption technology offering a self-encrypting drive (SED), SED-FIPS and instant secure-erase (ISE). The drive has a 5-year limited warranty. Exos X24 qualification drives are shipping to key customers and production drives will be available in volume for channel distribution in December 2023.
Western Digital introduced 10-disk CMR HDDs with 22TB and SMR HDDs with 26TB in May 2022. The areal density for the CMR product was 1.1Tbpsi. In August of this year the company introduced a 28TB UltraSMR HDD. Extrapolating from the areal density of the 22TB drive the 28TB drive should be about 1.4Tbpsi.
Seagate also said that it is on-track to begin ramping production in early 2024 of the company’s Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) HDDs in early 2024 (the company has been sampling 32TB HAMR HDDs). At the Seagate booth at the 2023 International Broadcasting Conference in Amsterdam. I heard that their 30TB HAMR drives are in evaluation with potential customers and will be shipping in their Corvault Storage systems by the end of 2023.
These systems use a form data protection called ADATP (autonomic distributed allocation protection technology) using an erasure code to reduce the time required to rebuild such large hard disk drives. This is especially important as the size of the HDD capacity increases, since old rebuild methods would take up to a week to rebuild a failed drive. ADAPT allows a drive rebuild in one hour.
In a sign that memory and storage demand may be stabilizing after many months of decline, starting in mid-2022, TrendForce projects that prices for DDR5 DRAM will rise 3-8% in 4Q23. This price increase continues the trend started in 3Q23 for DDR4 and DDR5 prices. Much of this growth appears to be driven by PC, mobile, graphics and consumer DRAM, with less growth in capacity, but higher prices, for server applications, driven by the use of DDR5 DRAM.
TrendForce also projects that with a 50% NAND production cuts from Samsung in September and with a focus on making NAND flash with less than 128 layers that NAND flashes will either stay at current prices or could increase up to 5%. While this may reduce supply and stabilize prices for now (NAND prices have been close to the costs of production), increase in demand for NAND is required to drive significant continued NAND price increases.
Seagate joins WDC with 28TB CMR HDDs and plans to use its HAMR HDDs in its Corvault storage systems by the end of 2023. TrendForce projects that DRAM and NAND prices will increase in the 4th quarter, indicating that storage demand is exceeding data center capacity inventories.
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