#Seagate Planning for 20 TB HDD by 2020

Seagate may have made waves last year with its 60TB SSDs, but the company is still first and foremost a magnetic storage provider. During its conference call yesterday, the hard drive manufacturer laid out its near-term roadmap, with aggressive plans to ramp drive capacities over the next few years. Right now, Seagate’s highest-end drive tops out at 10TB, but the company plans to double that within the next three years, with 16TB drives rolling out as soon as mid-2018. Seagate, according to CEO Steve Luczo, is in the middle of a major market transition and is planning new products that capitalize on the changing storage market.

Measured strictly by unit sales, hard drive shipments are declining as SSDs chew steadily into their markets; Seagate’s unit shipments apparently fell by ~10% last year alone. Seagate is transitioning to prioritize different markets — ones where they build fewer, high-capacity drives as opposed to focusing on shipping huge numbers of low-capacity parts. 

Consolidating into shipping higher-capacity large drives probably has some economy of scale advantages for Seagate, and the company is looking to push into markets like surveillance, where lower-capacity SSDs are at a distinct disadvantage compared with the hard drive market. But this only works if hard drives can maintain the gap between themselves and SSDs, which is why we’ve seen so many enterprise products pushing into higher capacities. As for Seagate’s 60TB SSD, yes such technology is possible, and one day it may even replace conventional hard drives altogether, but not any time in the near future. Few companies would have the pockets to fund purchasing that kind of product; Seagate wanted to make a statement about the future of solid state storage, not launch a new enterprise division.

Source:PCMag

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