Data storage leader Seagate has had a busy time of it recently, culminating in the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2018 held in Santa Clara earlier this month.
In the run-up to the summit, the Cupertino-based firm posted fiscal Q4 results that largely exceeded analysts’ expectations.
At the same time, it announced the departure of its long-time chief financial officer, David H. Morton, Jr., after more than 20 years at the company.
At the summit, Seagate received best of show award for its Nytro 1000 SATA SSD series with DuraWrite technology that deploys advanced comprehension techniques to increase longevity.
“Since NAND is very sensitive to the total amount of data written to it, more data has meant a shorter service life for the flash,” the company stated. “With DuraWrite technology, we’ve been able to solve this problem by employing intelligent lossless compression techniques.”
The Nytro 1000 series offers enhanced compressibility, even where compression is already used within a database, by targeting the metadata structure around compressed data.
Seagate was launched as Shugart Technology in 1978 before changing its name to Seagate the following year.
Jay Kramer, awards program chair and president of Network Storage Advisors Inc. said Seagate’s Nytro SATA SSD brought significant advantages to the storage marketplace. “It can reduce storage requirements by up to 50 percent and accelerate performance up to 3.5 times faster, while leveraging customers’ existing investments in SATA storage architecture for attractive cost justification.”
Yev Koup, enterprise SSD product marketing manager at Seagate, said the award highlighted the company’s continued commitment to engineering innovation.
The company also showcased its third-generation NVMe enterprise drive, the Nytro 5020, at FMS.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
In addition to its work on SSD, Seagate says it is doubling down on the enterprise hard drive market, pointing to its investment into the development of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to increase data storage density on hard drives. Its separate development of dual actuator technology is intended to unlock additional input/output operations per second for improved read/write performance.
Analyst firm Zacks welcomed Seagate’s initiatives to drive up areal density through HAMR, saying it will reinforce its leadership around density and “boost nearline drive capacity points by at least 24 terabytes per drive.”
However, other analysts worry Seagate remains over-committed to HDD to the detriment of SSD. “They could be a top SSD player if they put their hearts and souls into the effort, but for whatever reason they have not,” Jim Handy remarked, according to reporting from TechTarget. “They didn’t do what they should have done and used their ownership of the enterprise hard drive market to parlay that into ownership of the SSD market.”
Scientists in Canada created two rewriteable atomic memories (1.1 petabits per in2), storing the alphabet letter-by-letter in 8 bits and a piece of music in 192 bits (image courtesy of University of Alberta).
Handy’s comments come as experts anticipate significant oversupply in NAND flash technology in the year ahead. They highlight the potential for further sharp reductions in NAND and SSD pricing.
In other storage news, scientists in Canada recently pointed to the potential of hydrogen lithography to create the most concentrated storage densities yet known.
Researchers at the University of Alberta say their technique results in storage density of 1.2 petabits per square inch that maintain stability at room temperature.
