Seagate Discontinuing 2.5-Inch 7,200rpm HDDs

Here is an article written by Tom Coughlin, president, Coughlin Associates, and published in Forbes:

Seagate Discontinuing 7,200 RPM Drives
A Focus on Capacity?

Seagate Technology announced that they are going to discontinue making 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs later in 2013.

While 7,200 RPM is the predominant rotation speed in 3.5-inch HDDs used for desktop and near line storage applications, 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch drives are a minority of 2.5-inch shipments. These products are intended for high performance notebooks (which often are the larger screen size 2.5-inch laptops that serve as semi-portable desktop computer).

7,200 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs run at 33% higher rotational speed–providing roughly an equivalent increase in read and write speeds, but this speed in accomplished at a price. 7,200 RPM spindle motors use about 46% more energy that 5,400 RPM motors and run considerably hotter as a consequence. Of course the total energy used by a hard disk drive depends upon the actual usage and power saving modes, and caching of data can reduce the energy used by a HDD in a computer system.

SSDs using flash memory consume considerably less energy when they are operating compared to HDDs. However SSDs are considerably more expensive for a given storage capacity compared to HDDs (about 10X or more in $/GB) and this has hindered wide-spread adoption of SSDs in computers. Seagate has said that they are discontinuing their 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs in favor of lower power 5,400 and hybrid HDDs. Seagate’s current hybrid HDDs (or hybrid solid state hard disk drive as Seagate calls it) are the Momentus XT family, which operated at 7.200 RPM. The announcement implies that Seagate will introduce 5,400 RPM hybrid HDDs.

It seems clear that solid-state storage will have a growing role in personal computer architectures, although users needing more storage may find flash memory a bit expensive. Thus while all-SSD laptop computers are increasing in popularity, it appears that approaches that combine flash memory with HDDs may play an even bigger role, at least in the near term. These approaches can combine a smaller SSD that stores the operating system and applications and a larger HDD that is used for user data, or a hybrid HDD that has flash memory inside a HDD that is used to store frequently accessed data on the flash with less used data kept available on the HDD.

In a recent blog we noted that hybrid HDD flash storage capacities should increase this year from 4 or 8GB to 24+GB. A hybrid HDD running at 5,400 RPM could offer considerable advantages for a hybrid HDD. For a number of reasons the total storage capacity for a 5,400 RPM disk can be higher than a 7,200 RPM disk. Thus a 5,400 RPM HDD can use the flash memory for speeding performance while providing as much as 30% higher storage capacity for a given number of active disk surfaces than a 7,200 RPM drive.

With the announcement of heat assisted magnetic (HAMR) recording products by 2014 a few weeks ago, Seagate could produce thin (7 or even 5mm thick) 5,400 RPM hybrid HDDs with storage capacities of 1TB within the next couple of years. For computer users with larger storage capacity needs (like yours truly) a faster computer with lots of storage capacity would be a great boon.

2013 could be the year that flash memory becomes significant in computers with the rise of dual storage configurations combining smaller faster flash memory with slower but less expensive higher capacity HDDs. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you might be interested in the Storage Valley Supper Club meeting featuring a panel that will talk about digital storage in ultra-thin notebook computers the evening of April 18, 2013.