Unuseful Storage Products Association Formed by HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and WD

Where is your data? HGST, Seagate Technology plc, Toshiba Corp. and WD announced a new organization, the Storage Products Association (SPA), as a new voice to answer that question.

The SPA debuted at the Flash Memory Summit, where participants from member companies participated in a panel titled, Solid State Hybrid Drives Help Meet Today’s Storage Requirements to discuss the role of HDD drives and solid state hybrid drives. John Rydning, IDC research VP for HDD drives, moderated the panel.

Tom Coughlin, president of storage industry analyst firm Coughlin Associates, noted: "HDDs are a crucial technology for storing the ever-expanding data that humans and our machines are generating. HDD drives combined with flash memory can provide users the speed they need while providing affordable mass storage. With continued development of advanced storage technology and storage architectures, these amazing storage devices will provide a home for the world’s accessible data and serve every type of content users for many years to come."

"Cloud services, Internet content providers, social networks, mobile devices, big data and enterprise business transactions are driving the need for reliable, high-performance and high-capacity storage, delivering the best TCO," noted Sachin Piplani, director of product marketing, HGST. "HGST was founded by the pioneers of the HDD drive, and we continue to innovate and deliver new HDD technology to support the world’s insatiable need for more storage capacity. We estimate that more than 75% of EBs in 2020 will be stored on HDDs as they provide the best cost-per-GB-performance ratio of any storage medium on the market today and tomorrow."

"Seagate is proud to join our companion companies as one of the founders of this new group to promote the industry’s solutions and technologies and educate consumers," said Jeff Burke, SPA treasurer, and Seagate VP of strategic marketing and research. "The challenge has been to store more data, better, faster and more cost-effectively ever since Al Shugart, the founder of Seagate, pioneered the early creation of the HDD industry almost 60 years ago in the 1950s. Seagate recognizes that storage is critical to the future success of the world’s economy and future growth, and we want to ensure that the next 60 years are even more bright."

"Toshiba introduced HDDs using glass disks in 1991, but almost 25 years later, most people don’t know that most data is stored on glass disks inside their computers or out on the cloud," noted Don Jeanette, director, product marketing, Toshiba storage products business unit. "Yet, most users do know that their data is safe when stored by us. It is innovations like these, and thousands of others, that makes the HDD one of the world’s most interesting technologies. While we don’t intend to make the casual user into a HDD engineer, we do plan to showcase some of the new innovations that will change our users’ lives, starting with the radical integration of NAND and HDDs together into solid state hybrid drives."

"WD knows there is nothing more important than your data, yet many end users are unaware of the technology revolution that is happening in storage and HDDs, where that data is stored," said Ted Deffenbaugh, SPA president, and WD senior director of program management. "With today’s announcement, we are taking the first small step – with other storage companies – to ensure that our end customers and our current and future employees know about our great solutions and our great prospects."

"L&M Management is proud to be selected for management of this new organization," said Michael LoBue, SPA secretary and managing partner of L&M. "We look forward to continuing to help foster the growth of this organization as we add new members."

HDDs Backbone of Content Creation Revolution
The SPA helps storage manufacturers and users understand and support current and future storage trends and advancements, including the key role of HDDs SSHDs, in an effective storage mix for all consumer and business environments. SSHDs combine a small, fast and affordable amount of NAND flash memory with a traditional HDD to accelerate performance without sacrificing capacity.

The HDD is "the computer inside the computer," featuring sophisticated CPUs, firmware (onboard OS), DRAM, bearings that float on fluid, and magnetic nonvolatile storage. More than 500 million HDDs are produced each year, according to iSuppli, second only to cell phones for volume and economy of scale for products that feature integrated technical features in a complete, contained technology product.