HDD Remains Dominant Storage Technology (NOTION (0083) NOTION VTEC BHD & DUFU TECHNOLOGY CORP BHD)
HDD Remains Dominant Storage Technology
What’s the outlook for enterprise hard disk drives (HDD) in the modern data center?
Are
solid state drives (SSD), fueled by long-term declines in NAND prices,
on track to eclipse enterprise HDD as the dominant storage technology in
the data center—and, if so, when? Is the end nigh for the trusty hard
disk drive?
The
answer is simple and counter-intuitive perhaps. Despite the growing
(and welcome) adoption of solid state drives in consumer and enterprise
computing, reports of the demise of the hard disk drive are routinely
overblown. In fact, the 2020s are set to prove the strongest decade yet
for shipped HDD capacity.
Table Of Contents
Sharp Exabyte Growth
The data is compelling. In 2018, there were a total of 912 exabytes of
combined SSD/HDD storage shipped, comprising more than 800 exabytes of
HDD. That’s almost a zettabyte (or 1 billion terabytes) of
freshly-minted storage capacity, a whopping 89% of which consisted of
spinning platters.
Although the full-year data is not yet confirmed for 2019, all signs point to year-on-year growth in
shipped capacity, with HDD continuing to dominate. No surprise there,
and the outlook through 2025 is even more promising, once the world has
moved through the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
For one, Seagate,
which has kept most of its storage eggs in the HDD basket, is
projecting staggering levels of data growth in the first half of the
2020s. In 2018 research conducted by IDC, the storage leader predicted an increase in global data from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes by 2025. That’s 175 sextillion bytes to be precise, or one to the power of 21.
Of course, it’s unclear how COVID-19 will
affect these projections and not all the data generated will require
storage anyway—much of it will evaporate into cyberspace. But an element
of it, depending on the use case, will end up stored somewhere, whether
locally or in the cloud.
And
that drives demand for fresh storage. For this reason, IDC predicts
that 22 ZB of new storage capacity will ship in the period 2018-25. Of
this fresh supply, hard disk drives will make up approximately 60%. This
amounts to about 13 ZB of additional HDD capacity entering the supply
chain during the seven-year period. The vast majority of that total
(approximately 90%) will ship between 2020 and 2025.
Storage expert Tom Coughlin offers a similar forecast. In his most recent analysis, he foresees a quadrupling in annual shipped capacity between 2019 (1 ZB) and 2025 (4 ZB).
Impact Of Coronavirus
Despite the recent optimism, there’s now an 800-pound gorilla in the
room in the form of the coronavirus. It remains far from clear how the
devastating effects of the outbreak on the world economy will affect previous industry projections on fresh storage capacity.
What is clear is the critical role that large technology firms are now
playing in keeping the lights on for many aspects of everyday life.
Speaking on March 24 to CNBC as the United States prepared to overtake
China as having the largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases on the
planet, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the crisis was underscoring the role of cloud and SaaS services as “digital first responders.”
Indeed, demand for remote access file sharing and video conferencing to
support the needs of teleworking surged in the weeks following the U.S.
national shutdown.
The spike in home-based working might be good news for the cloud giants
and video conferencing firms such as Zoom. However, there is no obvious
correlation between the consumption of cloud-based services and the
demand for data storage. Will the data storage manufacturers end up
shipping more or less capacity because of this historic disruption to
the world economy? How will it affect end user demand?
Most analysts and industry leaders, including Nadella, agree the IT
supply chain will rebound from its shock fairly quickly. However, they
also agree that the longer-term impact on demand remains to be
determined.
Writing for the Motley Fool regarding the appointment of Cisco’s David
Goeckeler as Western Digital’s new CEO, analyst Leo Sun said the potential ramifications of COVID-19 on storage product sales were wide-ranging.
“The coronavirus crisis could reduce demand for [WD’s] HDDs, SSDs, and
flash memory products across multiple industries across the world. Sales
of PCs and servers could also stagnate and end WD’s delicate rebound in
sequential revenue growth,” he warned.
That said, given the essential role data plays in the functioning of
modern life, it’s unlikely data storage demand will fall off the cliff.
The more likely scenario is that the ebullient projections from Seagate /
IDC for the period through 2025 will broadly hold up, albeit suppressed
over the next six to 12 months as the outbreak reaches peak around the
world and the global economy begins to recover its footing.
New HDD Technologies
Pandemic
aside, there remain good grounds for the three main hard drive
manufacturers to feel confident about the medium to long-term outlook
for HDD technology.
Seagate is particularly bullish on this point: it believes HDD will retain its price advantage over
SSD until at least the middle of the 2030s. It points to projected
advances in areal density—the relative volume of data each spinning disk
can hold— enabled by its development of HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology.
This
upbeat assessment comes after several years of areal densities
flatlining. To offset the slowdown, the HDD manufacturers have been
incrementally adding 2TB platters to enterprise drives as a way to
increase capacity. Now, new HDD technologies are looking to up the ante
on areal density again.
While Seagate is hot on HAMR, rival Western Digital initially touted its MAMR (microwave-assisted magnetic recording) technology as the optimal solution to the challenge of areal density. However, in a succession of recent statements WDC
has been careful to acknowledge that not only is HAMR also a good bet
for the long term but that WD has itself been investing in HAMR
development (to the tune of $500 billion, according to reports) alongside its MAMR initiative.
“We’re
not going to sit here and tell you that it’s MAMR versus HAMR. I think
that’s a losing argument,” recently retired Western Digital CEO Steve
Milligan remarked on a analyst call in December. “We believe that both technologies are viable.”
It will be indicative to hear what Milligan’s successor David
Goeckeler, who took over the reins on March 9, has to say about HAMR
when he starts making public statements on the company’s technology
roadmap.
Meanwhile,
Seagate continues to double down on hard disk drives. It points not
only to its investment in HAMR but its development of dual actuator technology, designed to unlock additional input/output operations per second for improved read/write performance. And it continues to project bullishness about its single-minded commitment to HAMR.
What appears certain is that HDD capacities remain poised for
significant expansion in the coming years. Notwithstanding Seagate and
WD’s pronouncements on the subject, Japanese platter manufacturer (and
Toshiba supplier) Showa Denko recently announced the development of new HD media that would pave the way for HDD capacities up to 80TB.
HAMR represents a recording method in which magnetic film is locally heated at the time of recording. This technology has been developed to solve the “magnetic recording trilemma”: difficulty in simultaneously meeting the three requirements of fine-particle structure, resistance to thermal fluctuation, and ease of magnetization.Compared with the recording density of approx. 1.14 Tb/in2 for HD media based on conventional magnetic recording methods, it is said that HAMR-based HD media will achieve recording density of 5-6 Tb/in2 in the future. Provided that the same number of disks are used, it is estimated that a 3.5-inch HDD will achieve storage capacity of approx. 70-80 TB per unit.”Showa Denko K.K.
At capacities of up to 80 TB, that’s a truly massive data-bearing piece of kit.
HDD Vs SSD
None of this technological development reflects poorly on solid state drives—the opposite in fact.
SSD adoption will continue to grow as a proportion of the overall pie, and SSD and HDD pricing will keep falling over
the long term (although the medium-term outlook for enterprise SSD
pricing is somewhat volatile as higher demand boosts 2Q20 prices by up
to 15%, according to analysis by TrendForce.)
Advances in the NVMe protocol and a growing appetite for composable architectures built around flash technology and storage-class memory will further overhaul the established order, and place less of an outright emphasis on HDD in the modern data center.
Indeed, outside of the data center flash is already the default choice for storage. For example, HDD
manufacturers have long recognized the inevitability of the notebook
entirely transitioning to SSD as consumers rely increasingly on the
cloud for storage, remarks Stephen Buckler, chief operating officer of
Horizon Technology.
However, this does not spell the end of the hard drive, Buckler insists.
“Increasingly
storage is all about the cloud as artificial intelligence and big data
ever more play a role in our day-to-day lives, increasing the need for
cheap storage. Storage leaders such as Seagate and Western Digital
continue to invest in improvements to hard disk technology, signalling
that the game is far from up for HDD.”
Despite the headwinds around areal density and the increasing need for higher availability storage to handle AI workloads, confidence about the outlook for HDD has stayed constant in recent years.
“HDD’s
installed base is massive and works well with all but the fastest
high-performance applications,” found a 2018 report on data storage
trends from Enterprise Storage Forum. “It makes no sense for IT to rip and replace disk-based or hybrid systems, and may not for years to come.”
Nearline As The Sweet Spot
Much
of the optimism around HDD centers on nearline capacity. Nearline
represents a reliable sweet spot for hard disk drive manufacturers as
they meet demand from enterprise and cloud vendors, themselves looking
to keep pace with the explosive growth in data generation.
For its part, Toshiba, the third of the main enterprise manufacturers, remains eager to grow its share of the nearline sector.
Recently unveiling plans to
drive up its nearline market share, Toshiba insists its strategic
commitment to enterprise HDD is nothing new. The company points to a
near tripling in shipped HDD exabytes since the beginning of 2018, which it attributes to the introduction of helium-filled hard drives.
As Rainer Kaese of Toshiba Electronics Europe remarks, “There is still no way around HDDs for the cost-effective provision of storage capacity.”
Nearline is certainly the growth area for enterprise HDD, particularly
at the larger capacities that the industry promises. Storage expert
Enrico Signoretti goes as far to argue that the higher-cap, next-gen HDD promised
by the OEMs will not easily find a place in small to medium-sized data
centers. Few companies need to store petabytes of data locally, he
maintains.
On the flip side of the equation, it seems unlikely that HDD will
develop into a credible threat to tape as a medium for cold storage in
the hyperscale data center. Not only does tape continue to hold a clear
price advantage over HDD for archival storage, but there is a raft of
technologies (many of them centering around the potential of DNA for long-term storage) that may come to threaten tape’s dominance anyway.
What’s
clear is that Toshiba, Seagate, and Western Digital are targeting the
cloud data center as the prime area for capacity HDD growth in the
coming years. By 2025, approximately half of the world’s stored data
will live in the public cloud, according to Seagate/IDC’s research.
An
appetite for cloud data storage runs strong among both consumers and
enterprise. “Nearly 50% of cloud architects report almost half of their
organization’s infrastructure is in the cloud, with 77% sharing their
desired end state is running most or all applications on public cloud
infrastructure,” according to a 2019 survey conducted on behalf of data protection firm Veritas.
The
sales data backs it up. Demand among cloud vendors for high-cap
nearline HDD drove Q3 shipments to record highs “with an unprecedented
volume of nearline shipping to just a handful of U.S.-based tier-1
hyperscale customers,” according to analysis from TrendFocus.
Catch A Rising Tide
Once
the coronavirus crisis is under control, there’s every indication that
demand for storage capacity will continue growing, largely driven by
exabytes of fresh HDD capacity.
Just
as tape still has its place in the storage mix, hard disk drives have
cemented their position as the data storage mainstay for enterprise and
cloud workloads. At the same time, flash continues to strengthen across
storage use cases, and will grow as a proportion of an expanding pie.
As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.
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