Seagate and 7,200rpm HDDs – When is News Actually no News?

Two days ago, we published an article, Seagate Discontinuing 2.5-Inch 7,200rpm HDDs, written by Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates and published in Forbes. Here is the reaction of another HDD consulting and analyst company, Trendfocus, Inc., that obviously didn’t appreciate what Coughlin wrote.

Seagate and 7,200rpm Drives
When is News Actually No News?

In the last 24 hours, there have been several mentions on global websites of "… Seagate announces end of its 7,200rpm mobile HDDs ..."

Well, first of all Seagate has not made any formal announcement of this that we know of (no mention was made either at www.seagate.com or by official press release). Second, this is not news and is widely known in the industry anyway.

What isn’t widely known or understood is what this could mean for both Seagate and the HDD world.

A few key points to consider:

• Hybrid, if fully realized, is the key for performance: Seagate is firmly behind the hybrid approach, the addition of NAND on board to improve overall HDD performance (boot up, application launch, etc.). The company has been working on hybrid for years and is expected to formally introduce 7mm (and possibly 5mm) hybrids in 2013. The point is to close the performance gap between HDDs and SSDs while leveraging the capacity advantage inherent to HDDs. To date, Seagate has only shipped its hybrid architecture on a 7,200rpm HDD platform, so perhaps some additional optimization is under development to deliver the performance and promise of hybrid at the more common 5,400rpm mobile HDD spin speed. It should be noted that Toshiba’s hybrid HDD, released late last year, operates at the lower rotational speed.
• Possible cost implications: In general, 7,200rpm 2.5" drives cost $2-$8 more than 5,400rpm models. In the past, it was hoped that an industry-wide transition away from 5,400rpm and over to 7,200rpm would essentially erase this gap; however, as areal density transitions have become so difficult, HDD makers have had to stick wit the lower rpm to get higher capacity HDDs to market. 7,200rpm speeds tend to strain the hardware tolerances and performance margins at any given density, forcing the time-to-market gaps between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm models to widen. At the current 500GB/disk designs, many HDD vendors have yet to release the faster rotational speed models, expanding the time gap to well over a year for some suppliers. Downshifting to 5,400rpm and then adding NAND (along with a controller and lots of sophisticated firmware) enables a better-yielding HDD design to be accelerated to performance levels far outclassing 7,200rpm. Adding 8GB of MLC NAND plus a controller will likely be at the high-end of the $2-$10 7,200rpm/5,400rpm price gap, and possibly more with higher-quality NAND. Jumping to 16GB or more NAND means even higher material costs, of course. Seagate has clearly weighed this in the hybrid business plan, so we’ll be very interested to see how the strategy rolls out.
• Challenges: In addition to the cost question, hybrid HDD architectures from the four suppliers are not standardized and therefore are not easily interchangeable for PC OEMs. This means that either HDD companies have to find a way to adopt some level of standardization (it’s not clear this approach has been taken thus far) or have to align with specific OEMs in focused, perhaps single-source agreements. The former is probably the best option, although that does not preclude the latter; however, to date, single-sourced hybrids have only found their way into niche and not mainstream notebook PC designs.
• Competitor responses? Role of dual-storage/cache options? There seems to be demand for 7,200rpm drives for the near future, so we assume that competitors will take up the supply slack if Seagate does indeed follow the hybrid path. How will continued availability of 7,200rpm 2.5” HDDs affect acceptance of hybrid designs and the pricing strategies in 2013? Will competitive hybrids displace dual-storage/cache designs in thin and light notebooks?