Toshiba Establishes Two New HDD Technology Centers

Toshiba Corporation will establish two new technology development centres for HDDs.

The HDD Advanced Technology Centre will seek to accelerate development of higher density technology and the HDD Manufacturing Technology Centre will develop enhanced manufacturing capabilities. Both will open on 16th July.

Toshiba will co-operate in the development work with TDK Corporation, which manufactures magnetic heads, and Showa Denko K.K., a disk media manufacturer.

In 2004, Toshiba led introduced perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR), now the dominant technology for high areal density HDD, and in doing so realised significant advances in hard disk drive capacity. However the physical limit of PMR is widely recognised at around 1.6Gbit/mm² (1Tbit/in²) and densities beyond that will require further technology breakthroughs.

Toshiba, in cooperation with TDK and Showa Denko, is establishing an HDD Advanced Technology Centre to focus on innovation in future generations of higher capacity HDD by investigating promising technologies, including energy-assisted technologies and bit pattern technology.

By establishing a complementary manufacturing technology development centre at the same time, Toshiba, in cooperation with TDK, expects to develop stable manufacturing methods for future HDDs and to achieve the earliest launch of differentiated products.

Toshiba secures its position as a global leader in data storage by developing new generations of high density HDDs and by promoting optimised storage solutions in a changing industry environment drawing on its capabilities in HDD, SSD and NAND flash memories including memory cards.

Outline of HDD technology centres

Names: HDD Advanced Technology Centre; HDD Manufacturing Technology Centre
Established: July 16, 2011
Locations: HDD Advanced Technology Centre: Toshiba’s Ome Operations – Storage Products; HDD Manufacturing Technology Centre: Toshiba’s Ome Operations – Storage Products
General Manager: HDD Advanced Technology Centre: Kotaro Yamamoto; HDD Manufacturing Technology Centre: Tsutomu Tanaka

Comments

This news proves that Toshiba is not going to give up its HDD activity and is not following Samsung, also in HDDs and SSDs, that has accepted to sell its disk drive division to Seagate. And Toshiba took this decision even if the Japanese company is not vertically integrated (like Seagate and WD) and depends on TDK for heads and Showa Denko for disk platters.

It means that, in the wrong case, there will be at least three HDD makes in the next years: Seagate, Toshiba and WD. This number will depend on the results of current European and U.S. investigations concerning the acquisition off Hitachi GST by WD and Samsung HDD by Seagate.

Furthermore this press release confirms that Toshiba, as well as all the industry, is hesitating between energy-assisted and bit pattern technologies for the next generation of HDDs to surpass the limit of the current areal density.

In the first quarter of 2011, analysts from TrendFocus estimate that Toshiba shipped worldwide 17.5 million of HDDs representing 11% market share, and wrote:" Toshiba has demonstrated the technical capability to achieve time-to-market success, but it needs to improve on its volume ramp execution, plus make significant capacity investments to take full advantage of its newfound opportunities."