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Why HDD Market Declining?

Kaizhong Gao, IBT Service, answers.

This report was written by Kaizhong Gao from International Business and Technology Service (IBT Service)

He worked in HDD R&D for the past 15 years, and held more than 150 patents and developed many technologies currently used in HDD industry. In storage area, he developed technologies and tried to license them to the storage industry (HDD and other relevant companies). He also have a few other technologies that may apply to different fields. He the design manager achieved the HAMR 1Tb/in2 demonstration for Seagate back in 2012. He was the chairman of the magnetic recording conference (TMRC) in 2011 and co-chairman of Intermag conference in 2015, the largest conference in magnetics.

This article highlights a couple of aspects that contribute to ongoing decline of HDD market.

Impact of big data on data storage technlogies

Back in December 2012, IDC and EMC forecast the size of the digital universe will grow to 40ZB by 2020 – doubling roughly every two years. Now it is year 2016, we are halfway in between. Although it is difficult to estimate if the total size of the digital universe is along the projection based on 2012 prediction, one thing undeniable is that the digital universe continues to expand rapidly over time.

It is interesting to see that HDD technology has kept 40%/year ADC growth or more since 1990.

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Only until recently, this ADC growth rate has slowed down. One of the predictions previously suggests that as the ADC growth rate is reduced, the total number of drives shipped has to go up in order to meet the worldwide storage demand.

So why is the HDD total market shrink recently when the prediction is in the opposite direction?  Beyond rapid progress in SSD technology, there are other reasons that contribute to this phenomenon.

Over the past decade, the worldwide data stored has increased at a growth rate roughly at 40%/year. In addition, most data were move to be stored in the cloud.

With the mature of alternative storage technologies,
here are the consequences:

  1. 1/ Potential different choices of storage devices/technologies are available, (SSDs, HDD/magnetic tape/Blu ray, etc.) as compare to previously very limited choices.
  2. 2/ Move the data to the cloud is a more efficient way and has a lower cost/user, and more reliable way to store data. For example, many families use to have a few HDDs at home which is used for backup. For years, they keep several different copies of the files, or backup against each other. Many times most drives were barely fill up to even 30%. The modern cloud service provider can have the drives filled with data occupy more than 80% of drive capacity, and keep a reasonable number of copies by using smart software to manage the whole file system. It is a significant cost reduction per user. However, due to scaling, large data host or service provider sees significant storage hardware cost, thus have strong incentive to reduce the hardware cost. In fact, many data hosts have spent lots of effort study storage hardware, to help to improve data center performance and reduce the TCO. 
  3. 3/ With the large amount of data stored in the cloud, at the internet data center, the host now has much better capability to estimate the temperature or the ‘hotness’ of data. People use to define the temperature of data as how frequently the data is accessed, but has not given a standard definition. Here we use the definition given here. To reduce the TCO, the host uses different storage devices to host data with different temperature. For existing technology solutions, DRAM, SSD, HDD, Blu-ray and tape all have different capability to host different temperature of data, the solution that can host ‘hotter’ media typically with a higher cost, currently measured by $/GB or $/TB.

Figure 1-3 shows with the maturity of different technologies,
HDD market face pressure from both SSD at high temperature and Blu-ray
at low temperature sides.

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One of the recent studies shown that as the capacity of the storage device increases, the average temperature of the data on a given storage device will be reduced. This is due to the (R/W) data rate is either unchanged, or is improved, but at a lower rate as compared to the device capacity increase.

Over several decades, HDD capacity has been increased by several orders of magnitude, the data rate and access time have not changed as much. The time to allow a complete rewrite or read back the whole drive is increased over time, this means the drive will only be suitable for colder data as compare to previous generation each time with a capacity increase more than the data rate increase (and the latency reduction). In other words, as the total capacity of the drive increases, the temperature of the data on each drive is reduced, thus corresponding to a smaller percentage of all data created. Fortunately, the total amount of data needs to be stored still increase rapidly over time.

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