A class-action lawsuit was filed against nearly every major hard drive suspension assembly maker, alleging that said companies' price-fixing efforts resulted in higher drive prices for resellers and end users. Should the lawsuit succeed, U.S. resellers and end users who purchased hard drives or computers including them could be eligible for monetary compensation. This suit is a stateside counterpart to the 2019 Canadian class action covering the same matter.

The documents were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and name two groups of defendants, one related to TDK Corporation and the other to NHK Spring. The assemblies produced by these firms are reportedly found in 97% of worldwide HDDs, so it's reasonable enough to assume drives from all major HDD brands are covered by this lawsuit — to wit, Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.

There is no court date set, and the press release specifically mentions that there's no guarantee that the lawsuit will succeed. However, the case is a direct continuation of a 2019 antitrust lawsuit against the same suspension makers. Over in the northern lands, the Canadian courts have already certified the class action and rejected an appeal against it in 2022. While these facts don't guarantee a payout on either country, they're positive indicators nonetheless.

Suspension assemblies are one of the critical components in a hard drive, as they move the read-write head (the tip of the "needle" you see in hard drive internals), and must be spectacularly precise in both manufacturing and functionality, especially considering the magnetic density of contemporary hard drive platters. It's rather mesmerizing to watch them at work.

The price-fixing scheme allegedly ran from January 2003 to December 31, 2016, raising hard drive manufacturing prices, which were then passed on to customers. As with most class-action lawsuits, end users have the option to drop from the class action and pursue separate legal action against the suspension makers, or stay in it and hope for a cheque at the end of the proceedings. There's a dedicated website for anyone who wants to opt out, an action that can be taken until August 23, 2026.

Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital are the only remaining manufacturers of hard disk drives. They not only continue to produce these storage devices but are also actively advancing them as demand for HDDs rises again. While hard drives from these companies share many similarities, each relies on a different set of underlying technologies — distinct recording methods, actuator designs, platter materials, and magnetic alloys, among others — resulting in markedly different roadmaps. In this story, we examine these roadmaps and attempt to make sense of them.

The state of the HDD market

The amount of data that the world generates is higher than ever now that not only people, but also machines generate well over 400 million terabytes of data every single day, according to estimates made in 2024. Most of that data ends up in data centers, so Gartner predicts that data center storage capacity requirements will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5% between 2024 and 2029 and will eventually reach 3.19 zettabytes (3.19 million PB, 3.19 billion TB). While a significant portion of that data will be stored on 3D NAND-based solid-state drives, the lion's share will reside on hard disk drives, as HDDs can still offer lower per-TB cost than even the cheapest NAND memory.

Hard drives have been around for nearly 70 years, and over 220 companies have produced HDDs since they were introduced in 1956. In 2026, only three hard drive manufacturers — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — remain on the market, and their supply chains are largely integrated or consolidated, meaning that the industry has largely shrunk from where it used to be a decade ago. Nonetheless, the combination of per-TB cost, storage density, and storage performance that HDDs offer makes them competitive enough, particularly in AI and traditional data centers, which need to store plenty of data that must be accessed relatively quickly and therefore placed 'near online', or nearline.

In fact, over 60% of hard drives shipped today are nearline HDDs, according to Nidec, the world's largest supplier of HDD motors. The remaining circa 40% are consumer and enterprise NAS hard drives, video surveillance HDDs, desktop HDDs (a declining category), external drives, laptop drives (an almost extinct category), and legacy high-performance enterprise HDDs (Toshiba only).

Nidec estimates that 119 million HDDs were shipped in its FY2023 (ending on March 31, 2024), and 125 million hard drives were shipped in its FY2024 (ending March 31, 2025), an indication that unit sales of mechanical storage devices are stable and are growing due to demand from AI and traditional data centers.

Unit sales of HDDs increased in calendar 2025 compared to calendar 2024, according to reports from Hoya (the only maker of glass substrates for HDD platters) and Resonac (the largest independent supplier of HDD platters), though exact numbers are unknown.

"While 2.5-inch substrates declined as forecasted, 3.5-inch substrates achieved double-digit growth, resulting in overall steady performance," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "Current demand is exceptionally strong and is expected to increase further. Preparations to enhance our supply capacity are also underway."

The road to 100TB and beyond

All HDD makers have adopted energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies, though everyone uses different methods. Seagate is ahead of the pack with its HAMR-based 44TB drive, which is shipping to two leading cloud service providers (CSPs), whereas Toshiba and WD are trailing the leader with their FC-MAMR and ePMR/ePMR2 recording technologies, as they pursue deliberately more cautious strategies.

Note: HDD makers tend to list maximum drive capacities with shingled recording. To that end, even if the table does not explicitly list SMR, presume that range-topping HDDs with leading capacity use shingled recording tech, with all of its pros and cons.

Meanwhile, both Toshiba and WD plan to transition to HAMR in the coming years, though before that, they plan to perfect their HDD platforms and push their existing recording technologies to their absolute limits. Once everyone adopts heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that uses platters made of glass with granular FePt magnetic alloy, the development of their roadmaps will be more or less consistent and introduce HDDs with a circa 100TB capacity by around 2030 – 2031, though some roadmap slides are more optimistic, whereas others are more cautious.

Seagate: All-in on HAMR

All HDD makers tend to experiment with various recording technologies, platters, and heads. Just like others, Seagate has experimented with all kinds of EAMR methods, including microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), but publicly it bet everything on HAMR as the most capable one.

Before Seagate finally shipped its Mozaic 3+ Exos HDDs in Q1 2024, it spent over a decade evolving HAMR from lab demonstrations (FePt + laser writing) through prototype drives and hyperscaler trials. Starting from around 2016, the company repeatedly said 'next year' for high-volume HAMR-based HDD production, only to roll out the same statement the year after.

Between 2020 and 2023, Seagate's HAMR rollout ran into a series of well-known hiccups that repeatedly pushed back commercialization despite earlier aggressive timelines. The company had originally targeted volume shipments of 20TB HAMR drives around 2020, but persistent issues, such as near-field transducer (NFT) reliability, iron platinum (FePt) media durability under repeated heating, and manufacturing yield, slowed progress. These challenges made HAMR technically viable but difficult to produce at scale, which led to multiple delays and extended customer qualification cycles.

To solve these challenges, Seagate had to develop its 2^nd Generation HAMR platform, which it eventually named Mozaic 3+, which went into high-volume production in 2024. But now that Seagate has mastered everything that accompanies HAMR, it can introduce new capacity points, qualify them, and ramp up production of new HAMR-based HDDs fairly quickly. For example, the company is now shipping its 44TB Mozaic 4-based drives to select clients and plans to expand availability in 2027. Meanwhile, Seagate intends to start qualification shipments of 50TB HDDs featuring the next-generation Mozaic 5 platform in late 2027.

Following 50TB HDDs in 2028, 60 TB HDDs by 2029 – 2030, and plans for 80+ TB drives in 2031. With ~100TB HDDs, Seagate intends to adopt high-anisotropic ordered granular FePt (FePt L1₀ phase) magnetic alloy, which will give it a further boost to set new areal density records and ultimately produce HDDs with capacities beyond 100TB.

Toshiba: Stretching MAMR (almost) to the limit

Toshiba is the smallest of all HDD makers, so it has a very calculated strategy that is designed to address parts of the market that are not served by its rivals and to derisk everything as much as possible.

To that end, Toshiba's HDD roadmap is built around a conservative, step-by-step scaling strategy focused on flux-controlled microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) with some HAMR-based HDDs due in 2026 – 2027 being test vehicles, rather than high-volume products. The company's roadmap no longer lists microwave assisted switching microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAS-MAMR) it envisioned as an intermediate step between FC-MAMR and HAMR a few years ago.

For now, Toshiba has its M12-series 28TB FC-MAMR-based 11-platter drive with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and is sampling shingled FC-MAMR HDDs based on the same platform with 30TB – 34 TB capacities. The new M12 hard drives rely on glass platters, but with traditional cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy, which once again highlights Toshiba's step-by-step approach to adopting new technologies.

Looking forward, Toshiba's roadmap scales capacity primarily through more platters (up to 12), and continued FC-MAMR improvements targeting ~40TB drives around 2027. While the company intends to launch HAMR-based HDDs too, the 40TB capacity point will likely be limited to drives for select customers rather than true workhorses. More capacious HAMR-based HDDs are due late this decade.

In essence, Toshiba is taking a lower-risk, hybrid path: maximize MAMR and mechanical scaling first, then transition to HAMR only when necessary for the next major density jump.

Western Digital: Coexisting ePMR and HAMR

After abandoning MAMR technology in 2017 and having concentrated on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) since then, WD expects its ePMR and ePMR 2-based hard drives to co-exist with HAMR for years to come. Furthermore, as ePMR and HAMR HDDs are very different, this means that the company isn't pursuing a dual-track, like Toshiba, but a multi-track roadmap aimed at maximizing yields and derisking all the technology transitions.

This year, the company's flagship 40TB offerings will rely on ePMR with SMR technology and feature 11 aluminum platters with cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy. To squeeze in 11 aluminum disks and avoid using glass platters, WD had to squeeze the internal mechanics of the drive.

At the same time, Western Digital plans to start the transition to HAMR, with the first commercial 40TB and 44TB HAMR drives entering volume production around 2027, following hyperscaler qualification. Since WD's HAMR drives use edge-emitting lasers to briefly heat the iron-platinum (FePt) layer on the platters to its Curie point — where its magnetic characteristics shift — and temporarily lower coercivity to write the data, the HDD platters must be made of glass (or glass ceramic, though this will be used sometimes next decade), not aluminum, as it may degrade or deform over time. However, based on a comment made by the chief executive of Hoya, the only glass substrate maker for HDD platters in the world, it does not look like WD plans to use glass platters in high volumes for at least a couple of years, which in turn suggests a relatively slow production ramp.

"Starting in the latter half of FY2026 [which begins on October 1, 2026], shipments [of glass substrates] to the second customer will begin in addition to our current primary customer," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "We expect volume to increase substantially in FY2027 [April 1, 2027]. Equipment arrangements for FY2027, specifically for the second customer, have already been decided. Regarding volume beyond FY2028 [April 1, 2028], we are currently analyzing the situation, taking into account not only the increase from the second customer but also the movements of a potential third customer. Capital expenditures will be determined based on that schedule."

Seagate seems to be the primary producer of HDD platters based on glass substrates for its HAMR HDDs, Resonac (former Showa Denko) is catching up with its glass platters for Toshiba (and Seagate), whereas WD is the world's third maker of HDD media that is about to start using glass substrates.

WD expects to use both ePMR + SMR and HAMR technologies till at least 60TB capacity sometimes in 2028 or 2029, though it looks like proven ePMR + SMR will prevail in its shipments in the coming years. Yet, looking further out, WD's roadmap becomes aggressively HAMR-driven after 60TB: capacities are expected to scale to ~100TB in 2029 – 2030, enabled by higher areal density and drive architecture that supports up to 14 platters.

In short, Western Digital's strategy is a bridge-and-accelerate model — extend ePMR as far as possible, then rapidly scale with HAMR once the transition is justified. Beyond that, the company is targeting 140TB+ drives in the 2030s, which will require a transition to even more advanced media concepts, such as ordered granular and bit-patterned media, once HAMR on granular media reaches its limits.

Beyond capacity: High-performance and energy-efficient HDDs

In addition to increasing the capacities of their hard drives, Seagate and WD intend to increase the bandwidth and I/O performance of HDDs.

Seagate has offered its Mach.2-series hard drives with two actuators that double the per-TB IOPS performance of its drives, which is important for many clients that need to maintain their quality-of-service (QoS) specification, something that is getting increasingly hard to do amid growing storage density. Going forward, Seagate intends to increase the number of actuators, though the company expects to reveal its multi-actuator HDD roadmap in late May, when the company has an event for analysts and investors.

WD plans to split its HDD lineup into High-Performance drives (High-Bandwidth and Dual Pivot) and Power-Optimized drives, each tailored for different data center workloads. High-performance HDDs aim to increase bandwidth and/or I/O performance of a single drive with a roadmap towards 8× bandwidth and 4× I/O scaling.

Among the methods used to increase performance are using more than one head to read or write data at the same time, installing another fully independent actuator on a separate pivot that has its own set of heads, and therefore acting like another HDD. Dual-Pivot HDDs are currently in the lab and are targeted to become available in 2028.

In contrast, Power-Optimized drives target 'active cold' storage tiers, where data must remain accessible but does not require high performance. These drives reduce random I/O activity and are engineered to cut power consumption by roughly 20% to lower operating costs in large-scale deployments while offering predictable performance. Such HDDs will be positioned against 3D QLC SSDs starting in 2027. WDl expects these drives to be used to store massive datasets — such as AI logs and checkpoints — at a lower total cost of ownership.

Summary

The HDD market has shrunk from over 200 drive makers in the 1980s to just three in 2026. These three companies — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — tend to compete on capacity and performance, but they tend to do so using a completely different set of technologies, even despite the fact that they use some industry-standard components (HDD platter substrates, motors, etc.).

On the technology front, Seagate is all-in on HAMR; the company is already shipping 44TB drives and targeting 100TB-class products in the early 2030s. By contrast, Toshiba is taking a cautious, step-by-step approach, stretching MAMR and mechanical scaling before introducing HAMR later this decade. Western Digital is arguably the most cautious of the HDD makers, pursuing a multi-track strategy, which includes extending ePMR to 60TB, increasing the number of platters per drive to 14, all while gradually ramping production of HAMR-based HDDs, and targeting to launch 100TB+ drives around 2030.

Beyond capacity, both Seagate and Western Digital are also rethinking HDD performance with multi-actuator and dual-pivot designs to boost bandwidth and I/O performance to make HDD-based storage systems more competitive with SSD-powered systems. In addition, WD is also developing power-optimized drives to cut energy use for 'active cold' storage.

In general, 70 years after inception, the HDD industry is alive and kicking. Three companies are competing intensely to achieve higher storage density, higher efficiency, and predictable performance while retaining competitive per-TB cost compared to solid-state drives.

A Reddit user took to the social media platform to complain about Toshiba, which, they said, refused to honor the warranty on a 20+ TB enterprise hard drive. The documents Tom’s Hardware examined indicate that Toshiba refused the warranty replacement on the grounds of no available stock and a possible wait time of one year for a replacement 24TB model.

According to the r/DataHoarder post, the company where the user worked bought several 20+ TB hard drives a couple of months ago for their storage array. When one of the drives failed, they returned it to Toshiba, only to be told that their only option was a refund at the original purchase price. The company didn’t offer to replace the broken hard drive with a new one from their stock, meaning they’ll have to purchase a new drive at a significantly higher price today.

This is definitely a disappointment for any buyer, especially in the corporate setting, as they don’t often base their purchase decisions solely on price. Instead, they consider reliability, longevity, and the manufacturer's guarantee of support. Refunding an item at its original purchase price makes sense for the company. However, most users feel that the least a PC manufacturer can do is replace it with the same component (or a similar one if it’s no longer available), even if it’s more expensive.

“I'm guessing they saw dollar signs from the AI bubble and sold off their safety stock or are seeing an unusually high failure rate in those drives,” 615wonky said on their post. “Both reasons to stay far away.”

Other manufacturers are also taking extreme measures as the AI-driven shortage of memory and storage chips is pummeling the PC market. Another Reddit user had an issue with the Silicon Power RAM they bought, being slapped with a 15% depreciation fee for returning defective RAM sticks. This wouldn’t have mattered much if the prices of memory modules stayed flat, but the fact that a pair of 8GB DDR5 RAM sticks now costs more than $200 (compared to less than $55 for pre-shortage prices) means that the money they received from the return isn’t enough for even one 8GB DDR5 memory module.

Maker Will Whang has designed and open sourced an MK4001MTD USB Bridge. This is a USB mass storage compatible device which facilitates the use of the world’s smallest mechanical hard drives (obsolete for many years) with modern tech.

Toshiba launched its 0.85-inch MK4001MTD hard drives in 2004, offering an attractive-at-the -time balance of capacity and pricing. However, as they were sidelined quite rapidly due to the advance of flash memory tech, not many device designs adopted them. This has led to these tiny HDDs, and the data upon them, basically getting lost in time.

Whang explains that several prior attempts had been made at accessing the obsolete MK4001MTD drives, but they had fallen at various hurdles. So, the maker decided to start collecting working (and non-working) units to see if they could crack this particular old storage nut.

Starting with the basics, Whang compared drives and reader interface pads that looked similar to the MK4001MTD. Yes, it looks somewhat like an SD card with an MMC-style connector. So, various old/spare readers were used with the Toshiba drives to see what happened. Eventually, Whang decided to build their own reader based around the USB2240 flash media controller chip. It thus became possible to use a logic analyzer to see what signals were going where.

Unfortunately, it became clear that “this was not behaving like a normal SD or MMC storage device.” So, more analysis would be necessary, which would extend all the way into a reverse engineering effort.

For this next stage of the project, Whang acquired a beaten-up but usable Nokia N91. This mobile device was one of the rare MK4001MTD adopters back in the mid-noughties.

After getting the old phone to boot, so they could capture the traces, the purpose of each pad became much clearer. “The traces confirms this is a 4-bit SD/MMC interface and N91 service manual pin connection is indeed correct. The bus activity showed CMD52 traffic, which immediately pointed toward SDIO rather than a normal memory-card mode,” says Whang. “Looking further into the command contents, it also appeared that ATA-style commands such as IDENTIFY DEVICE were being transported over that interface.”

With the rough idea about what was going on, the maker decided to leverage OpenClaw to look after the software side of a USB reader solution. The AI agent was broadly successful, notes Whang, as it “successfully reverse-engineered the logic traces by building its own SDIO decoder, then wrote firmware for the Pico that exposes the drive as USB mass storage.”

Encouraged by the OpenClaw success, Whang decided to turn to Oups 4.6 and later GPT-5.4 for an improved result, which worked with their breadboarded Pico and a hand-wired drive.

Hardware design stage

Now happy with the software, firmware, and interface design, Whang decided to fire up KiCad and design a custom PCB for a neat, professional-looking solution. It shares the design language of the maker’s prior 1-inch MicroDrive project.

The result is that USB access to the MK4001MTD works reliably but is a pedestrian 0.42 MB per second read/write speed, at best, with the SDIO clock set to 10 MHz. This Toshiba drive was a measly 4GB (less than a DVD capacity), but at such a slow transfer speed, it would take about two and a half hours to read a full HDD or write it to full.

Whang concludes that they are happy with the collaborative work with a reasoning-focused LLM, and future projects might follow a similar structure. All the source code, hardware design files, and more have been shared on GitHub under the most liberal “I don’t care” license.

Backblaze just released its annual drive reliability report, with the company calculating an overall annualized failure rate (AFR) of 1.36% for 2025. According to the company page, its drives ran for a total of 115,638,676 cumulative days, with 4,317 units failing. This data comes from a total of 344,196 drives, meaning it has a good sample size that can give us a relatively accurate view of the reliability of the drives that it uses. The 1.36% AFR is the company’s best result since 2022, improving on 2025’s 1.57% AFR and the 1.70% AFR from the year before that.

Unfortunately, all the drive models that the company used suffered from failures. Two units stood out with only one failure each for the entire year — the Seagate ST16000NM002J 16TB and the Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26TB, although the latter has only been used for one quarter. The Toshiba MGO9ACA16TE 16TB takes the third place with only three failures, followed by the Seagate ST12000NM000J 12TB and the HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 4TB, which had four and five failures, respectively.

We also don’t have a list of red-flagged drives for the entire year, but Backblaze reported three notable models that had high failure rates for the fourth quarter of 2025 — the HGST HUH728080ALE600 8TB (10.29%), the Seagate ST10000NM0086 10TB (5.23%), and the Toshiba MG08ACA16TEY 16TB (4.14%).

The company investigated the reason for HGST’s double-digit failure rate, which was a first for that particular drive. It has ruled out temperature or airflow changes, and the current thought is that it has been affected by vibration. But given that these drives are about 7.5 years old, Backblaze decided to earmark them for retirement. On the other hand, the Toshiba’s 4.14% failure rate is already an improvement over the reported 16.95% from the previous quarter, which has already been addressed via a firmware update. Although this is still a bit high, it’s expected to continue normalizing as the new firmware is rolls out.

Despite that, Backblaze says that drive technology has improved over the years, and that capacity is continuously increasing while cost per GB is dropping — at least before the memory chip and storage shortage that begun in late 2025. While hard drives are still cheaper the RAM and SSDs, they’ve have surged by around 46%, with the Seagate Barracuda 24TB now priced at around $500.

10/15/2025 update: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that rival drive makers currently top out at 10 platters. But Western Digital has been shipping 11-platter drives in 32TB (SMR) and 26TB (CMR) since 2024.

Toshiba has announced that it is the first company in the hard disk storage space to “verify 12-disk stacking technology.” Rivals currently aren’t able to squeeze more than 10 or 11 platters in their 3.5-inch HDDs. Thanks to this latest innovation, Toshiba expects to be able to commercialize 40TB HDDs for data centers as early as 2027.

Turn it up to 11? This one goes to 12.

How did Toshiba manage to add 20% more platters to the confines of a standard 3.5-inch form factor drive? The answer is, of course, through miniaturization. More specifically, the squishing of platters required “the development of new dedicated parts in the stack, and replacement of the current aluminum substrate medium with a glass substrate that offers greater durability and allows thinner designs.” Furthermore, Toshiba promises “improved mechanical stability and in-plane accuracy, higher density and greater reliability,” with its advanced design.

Safe from HAMR?

Toshiba is going to support the new 12-disk stacking technology devices with its Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) technology for the headlining 40TB HDDs, sometime in 2027. However, it is also investigating devices using next-generation Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. This could be important, as its MAMR roadmap has been relatively conservative compared to rivals already on the HAMR train.

Some competitors, like Seagate, have roadmaps with 100TB+ HAMR drives (from 2030). WD is also plowing forward with HAMR, but Seagate seems to have leveraged its Invetac acquisition to put it ahead.

In summary, the 12-platter stacking breakthrough is an important engineering milestone for Toshiba. It will help prevent it from trailing too far behind rivals. Beyond capacities, Toshiba’s work is claimed to deliver “greater durability,” and that could also resonate with data center storage buyers and their TCO and reliability-focused decision-making.

More details Friday

Toshiba will be showcasing its new 12-disk stacking technology at the IDEMA Symposium on October 17, 2025, in Kawasaki, Japan. We expect to get some more technical data about its innovation there.

Another reminder to change your devices' default passwords has arrived, thanks to a new critical vulnerability found in Brother printers. 689 different models of Brother printers, plus a handful of other printers from Fujifilm, Toshiba, and Konica Minolta, are susceptible to eight new security vulnerabilities, some of which cannot be patched with firmware updates.

Security company Rapid7 discovered the exploits in a recent investigation of some Brother printers. The most severe of these, CVE-2024-51978, given a 9.8 Critical rating, allows attackers to generate the device's default admin password. The affected models have default passwords created algorithmically using their serial numbers as a seed, so attackers with the printer's serial number (accessible via HTTP thanks to CVE-2024-51977) can create the default password and access the printer and the rest of the network.

The other vulnerabilities opened up by this attack vector include the ability to trigger a buffer overflow and achieve remote code execution, forcing the device to open connections across the network, exposing the passwords for other network services like LDAP or FTP, and repeatedly crashing the printer, rendering it inoperable, among others.

The recently imposed U.S. import duties are designed to affect the vast majority of industries, and the data storage industry is certainly not an exception. Because the underlying technologies of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, tape drives, and storage arrays are so different, the effects of tariffs could be diverse on all of them.

And it looks like HDD and SSD makers will suffer the most despite Trump’s 90-day suspension of country-specific tariffs starting April 10, whereas producers of tapes will rejoice, notes Blocks & Files.

HDDs

We are going to start with hard drives, as these are arguably the most technologically advanced storage devices with the most complex supply chain these days. There are three HDD makers: Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

Seagate's HDD operation involves product development in the U.S. and Singapore; head manufacturing in the United States and Northern Ireland; substrate production in Malaysia; media fabrication in Singapore or Japan (when Seagate sourced platters from Showa Denko); and drive and subassembly manufacturing in China and Thailand.

Toshiba's HDD supply chain involves R&D and high-value component manufacturing in Japan (as the company usually uses media from Showa Denko), with mass assembly and component integration primarily based in China, the Philippines, and Japan (high-end HDDs).

Western Digital develops its HDDs in the U.S. and Japan. Media substrates are produced in Malaysia, but the actual media manufacturing occurs in China or Japan (when Western Digital sources from Showa). Head wafers are processed in the U.S., but the final head-gimbal assembly takes place in the Philippines and Thailand. Actual HDDs are built in Malaysia and Thailand.

Although Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital have different supply chains, their setups are subject to risks of substantial U.S. import tariffs, particularly on drives produced in China (124%), Malaysia (24%), the Philippines (17%), and Thailand (36%). Perhaps, if Toshiba shifts more production to the Philippines, it can avoid paying extremely high tariffs in the U.S., but the situation for Seagate is more complicated as a significant portion of Seagate's drives are built in China. Keeping in mind that HDDs are assembled in cleanrooms, moving their assembly away from China or Thailand quickly will be expensive and complicated.

Considering the diverse supply chains of all three makers, it is likely that U.S. customs will charge import tariffs based on where the final HDDs are assembled. Seagate and Western Digital will likely increase their operations in the U.S. to prove that there is 20% of American content in their drives to cut down duties, though it remains to be seen whether they succeed.

SSDs

With SSDs, the situation is a bit different. There are only six companies in the world that produced 3D NAND memory in high-volume — Kioxia, Micron, Sandisk, Samsung, SK hynix, and YMTC — but there are dozens of SSD makers, most of which conduct operations in China and other countries with low labor costs.

Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk are the only big makers of 3D NAND, which do not have wafer fabrication capacity in China. However, these companies use their Chinese facilities to test and package their flash memory. Under U.S. Customs law, the 'country of origin' is generally determined by the location of the last substantial transformation, the point where the product undergoes a major change. So, if a 3D NAND wafer is fabricated in Japan or Singapore but diced, tested, and packaged in China, the origin of flash is very likely to be considered China.

For now, this is not a problem as memory is now relieved from tariffs. However, Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk produce SSDs in China and drives are considered 'finished goods' and are therefore dutiable. Hence, to avoid punitive tariffs from the U.S. government, these companies will have to start making their drives elsewhere to remain competitive in the U.S. This applies to third-party SSD makers too. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to establish assembly of SSDs as it does not require cleanrooms used to make 3D NAND memory or assemble HDDs.

The lion's share of Samsung's and SK hynix's 3D NAND is made in South Korea, but they also have 3D NAND production capacity in China, mostly to serve local demand for flash memory and SSDs. However, retail SSDs from Samsung and SK hynix are assembled in South Korea, so the U.S. Customs will likely deem them as Korean products subject to a 25% import tariff (a 15% country-specific tariff is suspended for 90 days effective April 10).

For obvious reasons, 3D NAND companies will unlikely ship products containing 3D NAND memory from China to the U.S. to avoid tariffs once semiconductors are slapped with import duties. However, it remains to be seen what SK Hynix's subsidiary Solidigm will do, considering the fact that it exclusively uses memory produced at the company's Dalian facility (which used to belong to Intel). If the U.S. government decides to impose prohibitive tariffs on 3D NAND chips made in China, Solidigm will be in trouble. The same applies to Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk.

To avoid punitive country-specific tariffs when shipping SSDs to the U.S. once the country-specific tariffs are re-instated in 90 days following the April 9 pause, makers of SSDs will have to either assemble them in countries that are not subject to such import duties (e.g., those protected under the USMCA, such as Canada or Mexico), or will have to build them in the U.S. This will not relieve 3D NAND makers (or their customers) from paying import duties on memory and controller chips once they are imposed though. However, unlike makers of HDDs, SSD producers can change the origin of their products relatively easily.

Tape and optical discs

Tape drives and optical discs see different effects. IBM builds LTO tape drives in Arizona and escapes tariffs, aside from imported parts. Japan's Fujifilm makes tape in Massachusetts, so it is also safe, but Sony produces them in Japan, so it must deal with a 24% charge on tapes brought to the U.S.

Blu-ray and DVD discs are manufactured in China, India, Japan, and Taiwan. Each country's specific rate will apply when shipping these items to the U.S. and it is unlikely that anyone will relocate production of discs to America. What remains to be seen is how tariffs affect pre-recorded discs with games and movies.

Chinese researchers have developed a high-density molecular storage system that uses organic molecules to store and encrypt data, reports Blocks & Files. Information is recorded and retrieved using a specialized atomic force microscope, which manipulates molecular states to store data, according to the description at Nature. While the technology can potentially enable ultra-high-density storage devices that reduce storage space requirements and power consumption (e.g., HDDs with capacities of 100TB and higher), short lifespan of atomic microscope tips remains a major obstacle.

Traditional HDDs store data on magnetic materials that change their properties using magnetic write heads. The molecular HDD technology works by storing and processing data using tiny molecules that change their electrical properties when exposed to voltage. The researchers used 200 self-assembled Ru LPH molecules arranged in a thin monolayer (SAM), where ruthenium ions switch between oxidation state and ion accumulation state, altering the material's conductance using a conductive atomic force microscope (C-AFM) tip. A (C-AFM) tip with a radius of 25nm writes and reads data by applying a small voltage to control these molecular changes, allowing for 96 different conductance states per unit (6-bit storage), which somewhat resembles multi-level cell NAND.

Since this system does not need strong magnetic fields and does not need to heat the medium, it operates with extremely low power consumption (pW/bit range) for reads and writes, which is potentially very efficient for large-scale data storage, according to researchers. However, since the scientists envision usage of their innovations in HDD form-factors with spinning media based on glass substrates, power consumption of actual drives will likely be comparable to that of traditional HDDs as motors will still consume power.

The researchers estimate that the SAM layer has an estimated thickness of ~ 2.54nm. If we assume that each Ru LPH molecule has a similar width and length on the order of a few nanometers, then 200 molecules arranged in a compact monolayer would occupy an area roughly in the range of tens of square nanometers (i.e., 10-20nm in width and length). Napkin math then shows that storing 6-bits of data per 200 self-assembled Ru LPH molecules translates into around 9.6Gbit/inch^2 (keep in mind that the napkin math could be wrong though), which is in line with what HDD makers expect from traditional hard drives heat-assisted writing and bit-patterned media (BPM). Such HDDs featuring HDMR technology are projected to emerge sometimes in the 2030s and enable capacities of over 120 TB per 3.5-inch HDD.

While HDMR has its own peculiarities (e.g., fully patterned medium using a lithography technology), this technology is at least understood by HDD makers, which potentially makes the molecular HDD research obsolete as by the time it may reach maturity and be ready for commercial applications, HDMR will be in mass production. However, the molecular HDD technology seems to have an ace up its sleeve.

Molecular HDDs can implement built-in encryption using bitwise XOR operations. This means the system can securely encode data at the molecular level, preventing unauthorized access. This was demonstrated by encrypting Mogao Grottoes mural images, where each pixel's information was transformed using XOR logic and later decrypted. Additionally, the molecular HDD can perform logical operations like AND, OR, and XOR directly within the storage unit, reducing the need for extra computing power.

Despite its potential, the system has a critical flaw, though - the short operational lifespan of the C-AFM tip. These tips last between 50 and 200 hours when used intermittently and just 5 to 50 hours in continuous mode, according to Blocks & Files. Such a limitation makes long-term, large-scale storage applications impractical unless more durable tips can be developed. If this issue is resolved, molecular storage could match or even surpass the density of next-generation HDDs and archival tape storage. However, for now, significant engineering challenges remain obstacles for it to become a viable alternative to existing storage methods.

Intevac, a maker of thin-film processing systems, has disclosed that it had landed orders from another customer for a machine that processes magnetic films for HAMR media. Intevac hasn't disclosed which company will field the drives, but logic dictates that either Toshiba or Western Digital is gearing up to begin producing hard drives based on the heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. 

Having landed orders for its HAMR-capable upgrade for its Lean 200 platform from the second major customer, Intevac now expects its HDD division to generate around $200 million in revenue over the next three years, fueled by the industry-wide adoption of HAMR technology. The company expects demand for high-capacity HDDs from data centers and the AI industry. 

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ HAMR-based HDDs use glass platters coated with a magnetic film, such as an iron-platinum alloy (FePt). Data is recorded by heating the magnetic film with a laser to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity. Since the magnetic coating of HAMR media is different from the magnetic coating of perpendicular magnetic recording media, Intervac's Lean 200 tool, used to process thin films, must be upgraded. 

Apparently, either Toshiba or Western Digital has ordered such upgrades, and initial upgrade installations have been successfully completed. Both companies have HAMR hard drives in their roadmaps.  

For now, Toshiba uses FC-MAMR (flux-controlled – microwave-assisted magnetic recording) technology for its MG-series HDDs that offer capacities of up to 24TB. The company intends to adopt MAS-MAMR (microwave-assisted switching – microwave-assisted magnetic recording) for its next-generation HDDs with 26TB – 30TB capacities. After that, the company plans to adopt HAMR, which will happen with 35TB hard drives. However, it is not completely clear when this will happen as the company is behind its HDD roadmap published in 2022. 

As for Western Digital, it did announce in mid-2023 that its HAMR-based HDDs would enter mass production in 1.5 years. This year, the company started sampling its 32TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs, which will ramp up in calendar 2025. It is possible that the company's next-generation HDDs that Western Digital will sample next year will indeed be HAMR-based, so it is about time for the company to start prepping its equipment for making HAMR HDDs.

Toshiba has introduced its latest hard drives aimed primarily at cloud datacenters and hyperscalers. The new drives are the MG11-series HDDs offer up to 24 TB capacity and use conventional magnetic recording technology and the MA11-series with a 28 TB capacity that uses shingled magnetic recording to maximize capacity, albeit at the cost of compatibility. 

Toshiba's newest MG11 and MA11 HDDs share the same 10-platter helium-sealed platform with a 7200 RPM spindle speed and enterprise-grade enhancements to improve reliability and longevity in 24/7 environments. The new hard drives come with a 1 GB buffer to maximize their performance, so MG11 HDDs are among the fastest drives in the industry with a sustained transfer speed of 295 MB/s as well as a SATA 6 Gbps or a SAS 12 Gbps interface. 

Both MG11 and MA11 hard drives use Toshiba's flux control microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology, but the MG11 uses conventional magnetic recording that does not use 'shingling' whereas MA11 use shingled magnetic recording to maximize capacity. MA11 belongs to host-managed SMR drives, so companies that will use these drives will have to optimize their software for these drives and their shingled configuration. 

One of the interesting things about Toshiba's MG11 and MA11 HDDs is that Toshiba has managed to increase capacity of the base CMR model by 16% by shingling it. Normally, SMR enables a 10% capacity increase, though with technologies like OptiNAND and UltraSMR, Toshiba's rival Western Digital enabled a 20% increase with shingling. Apparently, Toshiba is getting close to that. 

The latest HDDs from Toshiba feature an annual workload rating of 550 TB and a 2.5 million hours MTBF. Also, the MG11-series drives also come with security options like sanitize instant erase (SIE) and self-encrypting drive (SED) technology, which help protect sensitive data in various applications, from online backup to video surveillance. 

"Backed by 50 years of continuous HDD innovation, the Mx11 family delivers new levels of capacity and total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiency enabling customers to optimize operational costs while expanding their data center infrastructure," said Atsushi Toyama, General Manager of Toshiba’s Storage Products Sales & Marketing Division. 

Sample shipments of the MG11 series will begin this month, with the MA11 series following in the fourth quarter of this year. 

Toshiba just demonstrated its first drives that can store more than 30TB using HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technologies — proof that there are still ways hard disk technology can compete against more modern solid-state drives. 

The company achieved 32TB on a drive that used the former, while it managed to get 31TB with the latter. Toshiba issued a press release detailing this achievement and mentioned a planned test deployment of the drive next year.

Although most commercial and end-users would prefer the faster speeds of SSDs they are often far more expensive than HDDs, especially for larger capacities. That means individuals, entities, and corporations that store a lot of data will find mechanical technology far more economical than solid state drives. So, you’ll usually find these types of drives in advanced data centers or on large NAS systems.

For example, a 22TB Western Digital Gold hard drive will set you back $600, while an 8TB 2.5-inch Samsung SATA SSD costs more with its regular price of $849.99. Even when on sale, the 22TB HDD costs $459.99, while the latter costs $563. This means that the HDD costs around $27 per terabyte, while the SSD costs almost triple at a little over $70. You may say that the almost $50 price difference means nothing to big companies. But when you multiply this amount by the hundreds or thousands of drives a server uses, you’ll soon be saving real money.

The two technologies Toshiba used for its 30+TB drive, HAMR and MAMR, aren’t new developments. In fact, other companies have also launched drives using these technologies. Seagate, one of Toshiba’s biggest competitors, has already shipped samples of its 30TB+ HAMR HDDs to its server clients for testing in 2023, while Western Digital has reportedly been experimenting with MAMR tech in its 18 to 20TB HDDs since 2019.

With more and more services moving to the cloud each year, many data centers need to expand their storage capacities. 4K and 8K video is also likely playing a part in the growth of the demand for these massive hard drives, especially as more and more movies and videos are produced in such quality. That’s because a one-hour movie shot in full HD video only needs 1.4GB of storage while a one-hour 4K or 8K blockbuster averages 22 to 38GB.

Achieving 30TBs in a single hard drive will then be a massive space saver, especially as the next step down in the capacity ladder is just 24TB. Going up to 30TB from 24 means you get 25% more storage in the same size and, presumably, the same or almost similar power draw.

High capacity HDD competition

These developments will hopefully make data storage more affordable, keeping cloud services at a reasonable price. Here are some of the future HDD capacities we expect in the near future: Seagate said in 2023 that it has targeted 32TB and 40TB HDDs, while Western Digital announced in 2022 that it plans to hit 50TB in the coming years. Toshiba also expects to release a 40+TB hard drive by 2027. So, even though HDDs are getting rarer and rarer in the laptop and desktop PC spaces, HDD manufacturers are still going full steam ahead with their developments for servers and data centers.

Retro tech enthusiast Bob Pony recently shared an image of an old Toshiba Satellite laptop’s parallel port. However, it wasn’t the port’s rust and detritus which caught our eye. Rather, the parallel port was visually shocking as it was packed with a tangle of contorted paperclips. There is a method behind the madness, though. The paper clips are arranged to zap the device’s BIOS password on startup.

Many people buy old PCs and laptops on used goods marketplaces like eBay. On these platforms, sellers usually offer BIOS-locked devices at the best bargain bin prices. If you can find a working hack to reset the BIOS password you can therefore save quite a bit of money on what is otherwise an old jewel.

We don’t know how Bob acquired his Toshiba Satellite A15-S129 laptop, but at the end of last month, he appealed to his Twitter/X followers for a BIOS unlocking solution for this device. A day later he revealed he had successfully applied the parallel port wraparound method to remove the BIOS password.

Another tech enthusiast shared a diagram that provided a very clear wraparound connector wiring diagram, upon which Bob’s paperclip meisterwork was based. It doesn’t have to be messy... This same social media user, Luke Weston, described the wiring diagram as “a Toshiba backdoor technique for resetting the bios password when the parallel port data bus is looped back onto certain parallel port control lines.”

The above is just one of many ingenious BIOS password bypass and removal techniques that exist. A quick web search will probably reveal if there is one for your device, but success rates seem to be better (security is more vulnerable) on older devices.

Paperclips have been an essential component of many tech tinkerers' toolboxes for decades. We remember them being useful in the pre-optical drive era for forcibly ejecting troublesome Mac floppies, then they became a similar essential for stuck CDs and DVDs. Few invested in the proper tool - a blunted bradawl - made safe to carry courtesy of a discarded champagne cork.

More recently smart devices with SIM card options have also required partially unfurled paperclips, or an officially bundled poky pin, to switch cellular connectivity – when changing contract provider, region, or country. With the industry moving steadily to eSIM, perhaps the partially unfurled paperclip will at last become a redundant tool, like Microsoft’s Clippy.

Huawei says its new data storage device, the OceanStor Arctic, will significantly reduce cost and power usage compared to traditional storage technologies such as hard drives and tapes, according to a report from Block and Files. The device is based on the so-called magneto-electric disk (MED) technology, which could revolutionize the storage market — if Huawei manages to produce such disks in volumes. However, the company is keeping details of the mysterious new type of storage product under wraps for now, so it hasn't outlined the details behind the tech. 

MED technology from Huawei will reportedly offer a rack capacity exceeding 10PB with a power consumption of less than 2kW. The product will be available internationally in the first half of 2025. The company also highlighted the technology's ability to lower total connection cost by 20% when compared to tape storage, and reduce power consumption by a staggering 90% in comparison to conventional hard drives. 

The numbers presented by Huawei look quite impressive, as today, a typical 42U rack can house up to 288 HDDs, which can store up to 8.64PB of data (assuming it's equipped with Seagate's shiny new 30TB HDDs featuring heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)). The power consumption of such a rack would be around 2.88kW, assuming that an HDD consumes 10W. There are 4U storage servers, such as the ASRock Rack 4U100-C612, that can house 100 3.5-inch hard drives and thus store up to 3PB of data at 1kW. 10 such machines would store a whopping 30PB — much better than Huawei's technology when it comes to capacity. However, such a rack would consume a lot of power. 

Huawei provided little information about its upcoming OceanStor Arctic. Since the technology is a magneto-electric disk (MED), not a magneto-electric drive, we are dealing with something that has magnetic platters with tracks (and probably spins). The underlying principle of MED technology seems to be the magneto-electric effect, which creates a connection between the magnetic and electric properties of a material. We don't know how this applies to rotating disks. 

Given the description, one of the first technologies that comes to mind is Western Digital's energy-assisted magnetic recording, which is used in various of the company's hard drives. Huawei's disks' exact form factor is unclear. Also, we're not sure how Huawei can achieve 90% reduced power consumption compared to HDDs using a rotating media technology.

The introduction of MED storage marks a significant milestone in general, however, as no existing MED storage products are on the market. 

The Toshiba N300 Pro is a big drive for big data, designed for systems with up to 24 drives with a warranty that neatly counters lesser drives like the Toshiba N300, Seagate IronWolf, and WD Red Plus. It also delivers enough performance to rival the IronWolf Pro and Red Pro. The N300 Pro is optimized for network-attached storage (NAS) where multiple drives work together in a challenging environment, making for a much more reliable solution than shucked externals. Is it one of the best hard drives? Let's find out.

The N300 Pro comes with a large cache that helps it maintain performance from 10TB and up. This makes for a more professional storage solution than your everyday WD Black or Blue, or Seagate FireCuda. The holy grail for hard drives is to get high capacity, good performance, and a solid warranty. Right now that still puts things at around 20TB and below 300 MB/s with a 5-year warranty and at least a 300TB/year workload rate limit.

Off-the-shelf consumer drives are effectively limited to 8TB, while serious storage systems need better drive density. While the average user can buy external 12TB+ HDDs and shuck away, the more reliable solution for SOHO or small businesses are drives designed for NAS environments where multiple drives operate closely together.

Optimization for this sort of environment include rotational vibration sensors and, in Toshiba’s case, larger local DRAM caches that are more efficiently utilized in multi-drive arrangements with the right data patterns and workloads. Toshiba offers more cache on many of its N300 and N300 Pro capacities — the Toshiba X300 Pro gives an alternative choice for singular drive use in high-end desktops and workstations — with a reasonable warranty that falls between the lower-end WD Red Plus and higher-end WD Red Pro. This positions the N300 Pro as a less expensive alternative to WD and Seagate — if and when pricing and availability fall in line.

Toshiba’s approach, which is due in part to its late entrance into the high-capacity game, makes the N300 Pro a surprisingly good choice within the 12–18TB capacity range. The N300 Pro can perform better in this range and can be found at reasonable prices. If you need multiple drives that don’t have to be on the cutting-edge of capacity, the N300 Pro is worth a look.

Otherwise, keep an eye on it and the competition — the WD Red Pro and Seagate IronWolf Pro — so you can grab your drives at the right moment, given that availability and pricing have been volatile. Worth noting is that the N300 Pro 20TB is a recent introduction and at present prices haven't really lined up with the rest of the series, but that's something that could easily change over time.

N300 Pro Specifications Comparison

The Toshiba N300 Pro is available from 4TB up to 20TB, and today we’re looking at what would probably be the most popular capacities: 12TB and 20TB. Both capacities have the same essential specifications with 512MB of DRAM cache, a sustained transfer rate of up to 281 MB/s, and the same 5-year warranty with 300TB/year workload rate limit. 20TB is a popular size for maximum capacity while 12TB exceeds standard consumer drives and overlaps with lesser NAS drives like the WD Red Plus.

The N300 Pro’s direct competition includes the Seagate IronWolf Pro and WD Red Pro. The Red Pro has a higher workload rate limit of 550TB/year while the IronWolf Pro has models for both 300TB/year and 550TB/year, the latter mirroring the Exos X20. The N300 Pro has a larger cache than the IronWolf Pro and higher performance at 12TB but otherwise has similar specifications. The Red Pro gets 512MB of cache at 20TB and a higher MTBF. The Red Plus does have a 12TB SKU, but it’s not comparable to any of these drives.

As with the Toshiba N300, pricing and availability for drives of this caliber remain question marks. It’s important to determine what drive or drives you want and to prepare for your purchase ahead of time. WD and Seagate provide superior support, but Toshiba may be less expensive during sales and Toshiba’s technology provides a more predictable level of performance. The N300 Pro has a better warranty than the N300 and also is designed to be operated in larger storage environments, from eight to up to 24 drive systems.

Right now the N300 Pro makes the most sense in the 12-18TB range, with slightly lower price per TB. Pricing does fluctuate quite a bit, however, so keep an eye on current prices before making any final purchasing decisions.

Toshiba N300 Pro Software and Accessories

Toshiba’s software approach is fairly bare bones but that’s not the end of the world. There’s plenty of free and paid software out there for storage management, and most solutions will probably be using something other than the vendor-provided software. If you are a home user buying only a drive or two, a normal dashboard/toolbox and an OEM copy of Acronis can be convenient, but a serious NAS setup tends to be beyond what Windows and Mac users want.

A Closer Look

Toshiba compares the N300, N300 Pro, X300, and X300 Pro right on the back of the box. Notably, only the NAS drives are rated for systems with multiple drives, and the X300 has no workload rate limit at all. The X300’s very limited warranty but extensive capacity range makes it better suited for high-end desktop and workstation use for non-critical storage. The N300 and N300 Pro are specifically designed for use in network-attached storage systems, with inclusions like rotational vibration sensors, and the Pro models have a longer warranty for peace of mind.

The N300 Pro is non-descript, with a simple white label. The drive is labeled “NAS N300” to indicate the drive’s purpose with Toshiba’s color-coding and “Pro” above to distinguish the two models. HDDs don’t have the flashy fanfare of consumer SSDs.

Toshiba has been interested in grabbing market share away from WD and Seagate and for that its drives must simply be capable. That is, it’s a no-frills approach, but Toshiba has focused on providing larger local caches for its drives with optimization for multi-drive/multi-bay environments. The N300 Pro’s warranty fits in-between the low- and high-end as well, providing a basic alternative.

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Comparison Products

The N300 Pro fits in Toshiba’s lineup alongside the N300, X300, and X300 Pro. On the lower end from WD we have the Red Plus with the Gold at the higher end and the Red Pro in-between. Seagate has its Exos X20/IronWolf Pro 20TB and 14TB IronWolf Pro, plus the surveillance-oriented SkyHawk AI on the table.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

While HDDs are not ideal for modern gaming, they can sometimes be useful for archiving, older games, or truly large collections where internet access may not be fast or guaranteed. While we found the X300 to be abominable in 3DMark, the N300 Pro does quite well. NAS drives are not optimized for this workload, though, and you pay more for multi-drive optimizations and the high level of individual drive capacity.

Barring a good sale, we would recommend caching with an SSD or using a standard hard drive like the Seagate FireCuda, WD Black, or even WD Blue instead. Among the hard drives we've tested, the Seagate high-capacity models outperform the Toshiba drives in this workload, with WD's Red Pro and Red Plus at the bottom of the charts.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The N300 Pro is middle-of-the-pack in PCMark 10, and while we do not recommend using an HDD for your OS or primary applications it is foreseeable that a NAS drive could be used with network applications. In that respect, the N300 Pro provides more responsiveness by far than the X300 and also over WD’s drives.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the drive (using an SSD as the source). Then we copy that same data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The N300 Pro has good read and write speeds but only mediocre copy transfer rates. Around 100 MB/s for a 20TB drive is acceptable. The 12TB is slower, as expected, but still beats the Red Plus as well as the lower capacity IronWolf Pro 14TB.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

Random 4KB performance is not a strong suit of any HDD as you are likely to be dealing with larger block sizes on workloads intended for mechanical storage. A little extra boost doesn’t hurt, though, and the N300 Pro at least has decent read latency there.

What we will take a closer look at is 1MB QD1 sequential marks from CDM as many transfers fall along those lines. The 12TB N300 Pro tops the charts here, for both reads and writes. This lines up with the on-paper specifications and suggests Toshiba is using large platters for this and the 12TB X300 Pro.

Considering 12TB is above anything offered with traditional consumer desktop lines — the WD Black tops out at 10TB, the Blue and Seagate FireCuda at 8TB — this makes the N300 Pro an interesting choice if you’re looking at a capacity that carries less of a premium. It certainly outperforms the competition, like the Red Plus. This is likely due to Toshiba being a little late to the game with its technology and intention to grab market share, so its lower-capacity models are relatively faster.

If instead you need raw density with 20TB drives, the N300 Pro is sufficient but has to be less expensive to be worthwhile. Seagate's Exos line often has sales that deliver an excellent price per TB with good performance as well.

Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most HDDs implement a write cache which is a fast area of volatile memory such as DRAM.  Sustained write speeds directly hit the platters and tend to be consistent. There are exceptions to both of these statements as there are SSHDs (flash-containing hybrid HDDs), OptiNAND drives, and SMR drives that deviate from the traditional configuration. We use Iometer to detect the maximum sustained write speed of the HDD.

The results here are similar to the hints from CDM: the 12TB outperforms expectations and the 20TB is simply adequate. We can recommend either, but wait for the price to drop on the 20TB. In fact we can recommend the 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB as well, since these grade along similar lines and might be less expensive than the competition. This would also apply to the X300 Pro, which is a very similar drive, with the N300 Pro being most suitable for a multi-drive solution.

If you’re not needing anything special and find a good deal, shucking is probably still the way to go for high capacity. That makes sense for a home user looking to add a drive or two.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some drives can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. HDDs of course have much higher idle power use than SSDs, due to the moving parts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

It’s also nice to see that the N300 Pro isn’t the least-efficient drive in the mix. The 12TB does pretty well, all things considered. The 20TB less so, but any large HDD is going to pull a significant amount of power. Especially in multi-drive environments this also means a lot of noise, but that’s inescapable. The Red Plus is a quieter solution but is capacity-limited and less performant.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

Toshiba N300 Pro Conclusion

The Toshiba N300 Pro is a competent HDD, even if it doesn’t stand out at 20TB against the competition. Its warranty is middle-of-the-road — better than the N300's 3-year and 180TB/year, but not up to the level of 550TB/year with data protection services. Performance is also adequate, and current pricing will likely be the critical factor.

Toshiba does make a name for itself by generally providing more cache, which is useful in multi-drive NAS environments, and with better sequential performance at sub-20TB capacities. With pricing and availability the way it is, this makes the 12TB model more enticing than the 20TB. The competition has a little extra capacity at up to 22TB, too. As of the time of review, the 12-18TB range is therefore the most attractive.

The N300 Pro makes the most sense in systems with many drives as that’s what separates it from the mainline X300 Pro. If you need a more traditional HDD with high capacity, the X300 Pro makes more sense — though if the N300 Pro has lower pricing, the two are otherwise quite similar. At 8TB and below there are many more consumer options. For other specialty uses, like surveillance, there are excellent drives from WD and Seagate like the Purple Pro and Skyhawk AI. While it’s common to buy external HDDs for shucking — or alternatively refurbished enterprise drives — for general home and residential NAS use, businesses can benefit from a streamlined model like the N300 Pro.

This still leaves a question about whether to go with the N300 or N300 Pro as they share many characteristics. The primary difference would be in the warranty, which is dependent on your SOHO or small business needs. In our opinion, it’s worth getting a 5-year warranty regardless, and the 300TB/year annualized workload rate should be sufficient. For a less rigorous environment, the regular N300 — which right now is best-priced at 16TB — is enough. In either case, this type of drive only makes sense if you intend to run multiple together in one system.

The 20-22TB cap that exists right now is a technology limit that has been around a while and will soon be overcome. Much more capacious drives are planned from all of the major manufacturers. The storage market is such that availability is not assured and pricing is volatile, which has made the secondary and shucking markets more viable, particularly for everyday storage use scenarios. It’s worth taking this into consideration when picking an HDD with the knowledge that a 12TB–18TB N300 Pro will provide a good experience for your multi-bay NAS at this time, if that’s what you need.

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Update 01/04/2024: TrendForce, one of the sources quoted in our story, reached out to clarify that "Toshiba Kaga fab does not produce NAND, Toshiba Kaga has established one of each 6-inch and 8-inch fab in the area, with one additional 12-inch fab slated for completion in 1H24." Though running under the banner of Toshiba's  Electronic Devices & Storage division, the temporarily closed fab is said to be "focused on the production of PMIC and logic IC."

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The devastatingly powerful earthquake that hit Japan’s west coast on New Year’s Day has caused a great deal of human tragedy. It also looks like there could be consequences for PC component supplies, as Toshiba has announced a fab closure while it completes safety assessments. 

TrendForce also noted that Taiyo Yuden, Tower, Shin-Etsu, GlobalWafers, and TPSCo have also temporarily halted semiconductor product manufacturing. It wouldn’t be surprising to see both supply and price impacts going forward.

With the violent and dramatic swaying and shaking inflicted upon structures due to the magnitude 7.5 earthquake, it is wise to survey them to check for damage. In its news center statement, Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage says that its Nomi City, Ishikawa Prefecture fab is currently out of action, awaiting the completion of a thorough assessment.

Toshiba’s statement stresses that all employees who came to work on the day of the 7.5 earthquake have been confirmed to be safe and well. It is still trying to contact some employees on vacation to check their well-being.

Looking at TrendForce’s map of the affected semiconductor makers, Toshiba’s Kaga location (above) might be one of the closest to the epicenter of the 7.5 earthquake. Naturally, Toshiba is currently carefully “checking damage to infrastructure and production lines.” We don’t have any preliminary information regarding the scale of damage to the fab. Thus, we don’t know if Toshiba is checking out of pure caution or if there was some serious visible damage done to its buildings or machinery. An update is promised for 5pm Japan time on Friday (3am EST, Friday), so we hope things will become clearer then.

On Friday, we cautiously expect a schedule for resuming production will also become clear. Toshiba currently states that it will make a decision on resuming “as soon as assessments on status of production lines is completed.”

Overall, there seems to be upward pricing pressure on NAND / storage as we start 2024. Firms began to intentionally restrict NAND flowing from their fabs in H2 2023 to try and prop up pricing and this seems to be working, for now. In November, there were multiple reports of NAND shortages on the horizon. Pressure on both the materials side and on the costs of production side were to blame for slimmer supplies, we heard.

The NAND market is complex, though, and simultaneously some factors push prices down, such as more efficient and denser NAND on the way for higher capacity devices at better prices. New China NAND fabs coming online with advanced and competitive NAND chips might also help keep storage prices down.

Time will tell if the temporary closure of the Toshiba fab has a significant impact on NAND availability and pricing, or whether it is just a drop in the ocean.

If you’re looking for a workstation or desktop HDD — after you've picked up one of the best SSDs for your primary storage, naturally — the Toshiba X300 Pro might be your best option. It offers a combination of high capacity, good performance, a solid warranty, and reasonable pricing, making it a good fit for more serious systems. Everybody loves SSDs, but you can’t beat the TB/$ value of an HDD, and you can only get so far with 8TB WD Blacks or Seagate FireCuda hard drives. We'll likely add it to our list of the best hard drives (for certain capacities), as it's good for content creators, developers, and other professionals that need a faster, larger drive that’s built to last.

We previously reviewed the Toshiba X300 14TB, a drive designed in the same vein but with weaker performance and a very limited 2-year warranty. It might suffice if you want more capacity than a standard consumer HDD can provide, but at that point shucking starts to look good. There are plenty of specialty drives that can fit the bill such as those designed for NAS, surveillance, or enterprise use. But NAS drives, like the Toshiba N300 Pro, are usually optimized for multi-drive environments, while surveillance drives will have firmware “AI” optimized for streams and image-related tasks.

Enterprise drives, like the WD Gold 22TB, often have special features like ArmorCache and a higher workload rate limit. All of these drives will work well in a workstation or desktop, but having the option of better performance across a range of capacities can be useful. The Toshiba X300 Pro and Toshiba N300 Pro provide just that, with a more relaxed workload limit in return for a lower price. Right now, the X300 Pro hits the sweet spot at its highest 20TB capacity, but its extra performance and cache at 10TB and up make it an interesting choice if its price matches or beats the N300 Pro in the 12TB–18TB range.

Toshiba X300 Pro Specifications

The X300 Pro is available from 4TB to 20TB but the point of such a drive is capacity, so we’re looking at the 12TB and 20TB models today. Like the NAS-centric N300 Pro, the X300 Pro has 512MB of DRAM cache from 10TB and up, which is more than much of the competition. This can help with many workloads and provides a larger buffer for small writes. Unlike the N300 Pro, the X300 Pro is not optimized for NAS environments with multiple drives but is instead intended for workstations and high-end desktops. It maintains the 5-year, 300TB/year warranty that should be sufficient for such systems.

The X300 Pro is, in effect, equivalent to the N300 Pro, which potentially makes it the better choice for many users at 20TB. It competes directly with the Seagate IronWolf Pro, which currently costs more, but with a lower data write limit than the WD Red Pro, which also costs more. If you're really going to write over 300TB to one of these drives, the WD Red Pro could warrant the added cost, but for most users that's a non-issue.

As always, it’s important to keep an eye on prices and settle on a desired capacity. If you need more than 10TB you can’t rely on general consumer drives. You can potentially shuck external HDDs, but if you want a more reliable solution, the X300 Pro could be a good choice.

Software and Accessories

Toshiba is more focused on getting the drive to your door than providing a full suite of software — software that's often unnecessary and unwanted for a lot of people. There are a plethora of free and paid applications available to monitor and maintain your storage drives. While toolboxes or Acronis True Image — or their equivalent — are nice to have as downloads, they're more useful for less-professional storage solutions.

The X300 Pro is designed for content creation and workstation use where management will be more rigorous. This does mean that the X300 Pro should undercut the competition a bit on price, though. Looking at current prices, the 20TB model hits the mark at just $17.75 per TB, while the 12TB model costs more than the IronWolf Pro 12TB.

A Closer Look

Toshiba helpfully includes a table on the back of the product box comparing the N300, N300 Pro, X300, and X300 Pro. The X300 technically fills the same role as the X300 Pro, but it has a much weaker warranty and no guaranteed workload rate limit. We were underwhelmed by that drive's performance, but we were happier with the N300 and N300 Pro.

The X300 Pro matches up well against the latter, which is designed for multi-bay NAS. If you're just looking for a single drive and don't intend to run it in a NAS, the X300 Pro should be a good choice for serious machines that need high storage density.

Toshiba’s color coding has a silver or gray label for workstation HDDs in contrast to a dark beige or tan for NAS. The hard drive is otherwise unexceptional, although we point out that the 12TB does have 512MB of DRAM cache. The IronWolf Pro and Red Pro are stuck with 256MB at that capacity. Those two drives - the IronWolf being the 300TB/year SKU - also have a sustained transfer rate cap of 240 MB/s while the X300 Pro should be able to match the 12TB N300 Pro’s 281 MB/s. These attributes can give Toshiba a leg up with performance at certain capacities which is why we liked the N300 Pro at 12-18TB, but as always it comes down to price.

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Comparison Products

The X300 Pro is part of Toshiba’s current high capacity HDD lineup, alongside the X300, N300, and N300 Pro. On the lower end from WD we have the Red Plus, the Gold for enterprise use, and the Red Pro in between for high-end NAS. Seagate has its higher-end Exos X20/IronWolf Pro 20TB and 14TB IronWolf Pro, plus the surveillance-oriented SkyHawk AI. The X300 Pro is very similar to the N300 Pro and is closest to the lower-end SKU of the IronWolf Pro in terms of warranty.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The X300 Pro matches our expectations by performing close to the N300 Pro. It's not among the fastest HDDs we've tested, but raw performance tends to be a secondary consideration for most hard drive purchases, with price per GB being more important.

The X300 Pro will certainly work for game storage if you really need that much space, but we prefer SSDs for faster loading times. It’s also possible to use an SSD in tandem with an HDD to cache recently-used or often-used titles (using caching software), somewhat like an SSHD, but that’s up to you.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The X300 Pro aligns with the N300 Pro in PCMark 10 as well. Depending on current online prices, if the N300 Pro costs less, there doesn't seem to be any benefit in picking up the X300 Pro instead — at least based on PCMark and 3DMark.

Performance is adequate , falling in-between WD and Seagate. This reflects technological differences that, at the end of the day, probably don’t amount to much difference. If you’re trying to use an HDD for raw applications, you'd be better off with an SSD.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the drive (using an SSD as the source). Then we copy that same data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. The system is rebooted between the various tests, so Windows' caching algorithms do not impact the results.

The X300 Pro manages about 90 MB/s at 12TB and 100 MB/s at 20TB. This is a fair result, not quite as fast as the top HDDs but not that far off from the best, either. Here the X300 Pro also slightly outpaces the N300 Pro in the copy test, though the extra 1–2 MB/s is hardly worth mentioning.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The X300 Pro’s random read latency is pretty good, but random write latency suffers. HDDs are best not paired with smaller I/O, as indicated by ATTO with the drives needing 16KB or more to peak. HDDs are particularly good with sequential workloads, which may include cached I/O and data backups, and the X300 Pro delivers good performance here. The 20TB is right up with the competition, but as with the N300 Pro, the 12TB is clearly above the smaller-capacity drives from WD and Seagate.

Unfortunately, at the time of review the 12-18TB X300 Pro SKUs are not offering a compelling price per terabyte. The N300 Pro is better in that respect and is essentially the same drive. However, it’s worth keeping an eye on prices as the X300 Pro will be a good performer within that range. That said, at 20TB the X300 Pro is currently less expensive than the N300 Pro, IronWolf Pro, and Red Pro, and it is designed for HEDT or workstation usage, so it can be a good pick if you need that level of density.

Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most HDDs implement a write cache which is a fast area of volatile memory such as DRAM.  Sustained write speeds directly hit the platters and tend to be consistent. There are exceptions to both of these statements as there are SSHDs (flash-containing hybrid HDDs), OptiNAND drives, and SMR drives that deviate from the traditional configuration. We use Iometer to detect the maximum sustained write speed of the HDD.

The X300 Pro’s steady state write performance is good at both 12TB and 20TB. The 12TB again outperforms the competition. Most of the higher capacity hard drives we've tested (outside of the WD Red Plus 12TB) fall within a relatively narrow range of 250–290 MB/s average write speeds.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some drives can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

The X300 Pro’s efficiency is average to above-average depending on the capacity. HDDs pull far more power than SSDs, even Gen5 SSDs, which can quickly add up with multi-drive arrays. Data is critical and drives need to be kept cool for maximum lifespan so this is always a consideration.

The Red Plus is a good example of a drive designed to run lighter, with far lower maximum power consumption and low average power consumption. It’s limited in capacity to 12TB, though, and Toshiba’s N300 Pro is a compelling alternative at that capacity for NAS, especially as it performs well. The X300 Pro can offer something similar for a workstation environment, but currently makes the most sense at 20TB.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

Toshiba X300 Pro conclusion: A decent option, dependent on pricing

The X300 Pro is Toshiba’s workstation version of the N300 Pro, the latter being optimized for multi-drive environments. It’s certainly better than the vanilla X300, with superior performance and a much better warranty. The warranty on both the X300 Pro and N300 Pro aligns at the 300TB/year workload rate limit (WRL), which is above 180TB/year drives like WD’s Red Plus but below the highest-end 550TB/year models like the WD Red Pro. This puts it in a good place if it’s priced competitively.

The X300 Pro, like the N300 Pro, shines at relatively lower capacities, in the tested case at 12TB. This is due in part to Toshiba providing 512MB of DRAM cache at 10TB and up, but the higher sustained transfer rates also suggest larger platters. The N300 Pro, in particular, is priced well enough in the 12TB–18TB range to be interesting even for use outside of a NAS, while the X300 Pro is currently solid at 20TB if you need that extra bit of capacity. If you want 22TB, though, you’re looking at the Seagate IronWolf Pro or Red Pro, or perhaps the WD Gold if you require the ArmorCache feature.

The IronWolf Pro and Red Pro are designed for NAS, so if you’re looking for surveillance HDDs you should look at the Seagate SkyHawk AI or WD Purple Pro, the latter for 22TB, instead. Toshiba offers its S300 Pro and S300 drives for that niche, but they currently top out at 10TB. The N300 Pro is a good NAS choice for drives below 20TB. The X300 Pro is designed specifically for workstations, but these drives have a lot of similarities across models and can be substituted in some cases. These capacity limits have also been around for a while now, and that will soon change with upcoming technology, so plan accordingly.

On the whole we have nothing bad to say about the X300 Pro and think it fits into a good spot, considering the WD Blue, WD Black, and Seagate FireCuda effectively top off at 8TB. Buying drives from second-hand markets or using externals for shucking will only get you so far, especially if you’re looking for a good warranty and reliability for important data or your business. It would be nice if prices would come down and stay there more reliably — availability has been iffy lately — but at least the N300 Pro can help fill in the gaps when the X300 Pro is missing.

In many cases, the choice of a high capacity HDD will come down to price per GB first, with performance and warranty as secondary considerations. Given the Seagate Exos X20 20TB can be had for $309 (and we've seen it as low as $269), that's currently the 20TB drive to beat on bang for the buck, and it helps that performance is also near the top of most charts. If the X300 Pro (or N300 Pro) price drops to less than the Seagate Exos lineup, it becomes far more worthy of consideration.

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Hard disk drive maker Seagate was recently slapped with a $300 million fine by the U.S. Department of Commerce for violating US sanctions that applied export controls on products sold to Huawei, but that may be just the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of the last two weeks, a slew of law firms have filed class action suits against Seagate on behalf of shareholders who allege they were misled about the company selling millions of hard drives to the banned Huawei. 

Those sales totaled $1.1 billion in revenue, of which Seagate profited an estimated $150 million. After paying $300 million for that transgression, the toll will become higher as the class action proceeds, alleging that Seagate made materially false and/or misleading statements to its shareholders about its business dealings with the Chinese tech company. 

The U.S. government banned sales of a broad class of devices to Huawei back in 2019. Seagate's competitors, Western Digital and Toshiba, immediately ceased providing hard drives to Huawei. However, Seagate contended that its HDD sales were legal, even though Western Digital insisted the devices fell under the umbrella of US sanctions. 

Seagate continued selling 7.4 million drives to Huawei from August 2020 to September 2021, even inking a rather unneeded deal to become Huawei's 'sole supplier (no one else would sell to Huawei anyway). The issue eventually caught the attention of a U.S. Senator who called for an investigation. That finally lead to the $300 million fine that was levied against Seagate by the US Department of Commerce (payable in $15 million increments every quarter for five years).

These sorts of fines aren't good for the bottom line or for shareholder value. As such, multiple law firms are now soliciting lead plaintiffs for a class action lawsuit that has been filed against Seagate. We've seen calls for lead plaintiffs from 14 law firms over the last two weeks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), so there's no shortage of legal representatives for those impacted.

To qualify, litigants will have to have experienced a loss on Seagate stock that was purchased between September 15, 2020, and October 25, 2022. The court will select a lead plaintiff on September 8, 2023, and the class action lawsuit will then proceed against Seagate. The lawsuit alleges that Seagate issued false and/or misleading statements about:

• The nature and magnitude of Seagate’s HDD sales to Huawei, including that Seagate experienced a significant acceleration in sales to Huawei immediately after the BIS rules went into effect and Seagate’s competitors stopped selling to Huawei; and
• That the underlying details of Seagate’s HDD manufacturing process, including the use of covered U.S. software and technology in “essential ‘production'” processes, rendered its sales to Huawei in violation of the BIS export rules
• As a result, Seagate was in blatant violation of the BIS export rules which resulted in an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Commerce and exposed Seagate to hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and penalties.
• As a result, Defendants’ positive statements about the company’s business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.

The lawsuit comes amidst what could be easily defined as a challenging time for Seagate, as the industry-wide slump has led the company to recently announce sweeping layoffs. We've reached out to Seagate for comment and will update as necessary. 

The Toshiba X300 is a budget desktop hard drive that’s most compelling at capacities over 8TB, offering extra storage without needing an enterprise or NAS label. Unfortunately, its performance is lackluster despite its 7200-RPM speed, plenty of cache, and versatile Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology. The price per terabyte at higher capacities is also relatively high, so the drives are close to the cost of the pricey 14TB Seagate IronWolf and 14TB WD Red Plus. Aside from peak write speed, those two NAS drives are generally superior to the X300.

There are definitely superior options on our list of best hard drives if you only need 8TB or less in an HDD. The WD Blue is good for those on a budget, while the Seagate FireCuda offers strong performance and a good warranty. If you need a drive for NAS, particularly if you want a five-year warranty, there are better options with the Seagate IronWolf Pro and WD Red Pro. The Red Plus is also a quieter, more efficient alternative. However, if you're focused on a drive designed specifically for desktop PCs, the Seagate BarraCuda Pro excels in everything over the X300 but is significantly more expensive. That leaves the X300 as being best if you need a specific amount of capacity in a single drive and can compromise on general performance.

Specifications

The current X300 lineup has capacities of up to 18TB, and cache up to 512MB. Our older 14TB X300 only has 256MB of cache, but it still uses CMR tech and spins at 7200 RPM. Like the WD Blue and Seagate BarraCuda, the X300 is only warrantied for two years, but the X300 has higher capacity options.

Excluding enterprise and NAS drives in the >8TB space, one possible competitor is the Seagate BarraCuda Pro, but that drive comes with a full five-year warranty. However, the 14TB X300 at $245.99 is significantly cheaper than the $330 14TB BarraCuda Pro. If we include NAS, we’re looking at the three-year WD Red Plus at about the same price, but that drive is optimized for running in a different environment.

Software and Accessories

Toshiba’s software support is bare bones, but it does exist. Looking up your specific model on Toshiba’s website will yield a link to the downloadable Toshiba Storage Diagnostic Tool to inspect the health of your drive. 

A Closer Look

The X300 is exceptionally plain, aside from the blue PCB. There are not many HDD manufacturers still in business - just compare the number of brands to SSDs! However, Toshiba’s drives fill some gaps that may cater to you. The X300 has characteristics similar to the entry-level WD Blue but has a higher spindle speed with higher capacity options. It’s not a NAS or enterprise drive, so it is best described as being for high-end desktops or workstations. 

Here we can see that the drive adheres to the standard 3.5" form factor and comes with the ubiquitous 6 Gb/s SATA connector. 

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Comparison Products

The 14TB Toshiba X300 faces our suite of 8TB hard drives, including the WD Blue, the older HGST UltraStar He8, the Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB, the Seagate FireCuda, and the Seagate BarraCuda. Larger 20TB drives include the WD Red Pro, the Seagate Exos X20, the Seagate IronWolf Pro, and the Seagate SkyHawk AI. We also threw in the 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro and the 12TB WD Red Plus. 

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Yes, gaming isn't the preferred use case for this class of hard drives, but we include these tests for perspective. Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The X300’s 3DMark performance is simply abysmal, as it trails the rest of the test pool in every metric. It's clear that this drive isn't geared for low-latency access of any sort — not even by HDD standards. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Given the dismal performance in the previous benchmark, it comes as no surprise that the drives' PCMark 10 performance is likewise terrible.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Things are more cheery with DiskBench, especially during the read-centric portion of the workload. However, file copies are slow, with the X300 delivering performance akin to the smaller 5400-RPM Blue. This drive would be okay for infrequent writes, more so than the SMR-equipped BarraCuda, but it’s no match for other 7200-RPM drives. 

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The X300's performance in sequential workloads is satisfactory in ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark. That said, performance in random workloads is disappointing, but this drive is more likely to be used for larger, sequential transfers.

Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most HDDs implement a write cache which is a fast area of volatile memory such as DRAM.  Sustained write speeds directly hit the platters and tend to be consistent. There are exceptions to both of these statements as there are SSHDs (flash-containing hybrid HDDs), OptiNAND drives, and SMR drives that deviate from the traditional configuration. We use Iometer to detect the maximum sustained write speed of the HDD.

The X300's sustained sequential write performance is generally good, but the drive suffers from inconsistency. The X300 is clearly faster than the smaller drives but suffers from more noticeable dips as the drive writes data to the platters. As such, this would not be the best choice for a NAS.

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.

Some drives can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

The X300 is not particularly efficient, especially given its capacity. However, it is satisfactory for desktop PCs.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

Conclusion

The Toshiba X300 is a difficult drive to recommend, given its relatively weak performance and its premium pricing at higher capacities. It has plenty of challengers at lower capacities, but it mostly faces enterprise and NAS drives at capacities exceeding 8TB (except the BarraCuda Pro — which notably costs a lot more per terabyte). However, if you happen to be a desktop user who needs a lot of storage in a single drive and can tolerate lackluster performance, the X300 could be a good option.

Although the X300’s overall performance is quite poor, it has high transfer rates thanks to its 7200-RPM spindle speed and CMR technology. This translates to relatively good read performance and higher peak write performance, although write consistency leaves much to be desired.

Selecting a drive like the IronWolf or Red Plus would make sense as they have an extra year on their warranties, are priced in the same ballpark, and generally perform as well or better than the X300 in most areas. The X300 has higher steady-state write performance, especially over the Red Plus, which may be why it’s marketed towards professional use, such as content creation and production workflows.

The Toshiba X300 is another case of a niche HDD that's good for one job in specific capacities. Still, we wouldn't recommend it beyond that, especially given the wide assortment of competent alternatives that offer far more balanced performance profiles. 

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The Seagate IronWolf Pro is a high-end NAS hard drive with a wide range of capacities, solid all-around performance, and strong support, earning it a spot on our list of best hard drives. It’s priced right, too, with little direct competition outside of the WD Red Pro. The drive comes with a 7200-RPM spindle speed, 256MB of cache and uses the performant CMR technology that ensures consistent performance in a variety of use cases. The drive is backed by a robust five-year warranty augmented by three years of data recovery services. 

Seagate's own FireCuda is the better choice for desktop use, but it only has a limited capacity range of 4TB and 8TB. At higher capacities, you would need to look to the Toshiba X300 or Seagate BarraCuda Pro for competing drives, but these are not currently priced favorably at the 14TB capacity point.

For NAS applications, there’s also the lower-end non-pro Seagate IronWolf and WD Red Plus, although these are not significantly less expensive at the moment. In any case, the IronWolf Pro seems to provide a similar experience even where efficiency is concerned, so it’s hard to pass up. It isn't as competitive against the 20TB hard drives we have reviewed, but this is to be expected. The choice, therefore, comes down to the desired capacity and relative pricing at that capacity. Seagate’s software and support for the IronWolf Pro also make it compelling, even outside of NAS use cases.

Specifications

The Seagate IronWolf Pro comes in a variety of capacities up to 22TB, and all capacities but 22TB have two different versions depending on the application. The base version generally has a 300 TB/year workload rate limit (WRL) that defines the cumulative amount of data that can be read or written to the drive per year, which applies to our 14TB sample today. The enhanced variant has a 550 TB/year WRL, better performance, and supports unlimited drive bays, making it more of an enterprise part.

The base version is currently $261. Given its performance and warranty, that's an excellent price per terabyte, even for non-NAS use. The IronWolf Pro uses the performant CMR technology at 7200 RPM with 256MB of cache to reach a transfer rate of 255 MB/s. The warranty is five years with three years of Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services (Seagate claims a 90% recovery rate). 

The IronWolf Pro's biggest competitor is the WD Red Pro, which at 14TB, is a few dollars more. The Red Pro has OptiNAND technology and more cache but lacks data recovery service. There are alternatives to the IronWolf Pro at 14TB, depending on your needs. The Seagate Exos X18, similar to the Exos X20 we’ve reviewed, is the IronWolf Pro’s sibling, providing 12 Gbps SAS variants but lacking data recovery services. It’s also possible to step down to drives like the WD Red Plus, the Toshiba X300, or the regular IronWolf, but these perform worse and have shorter warranties. Current pricing favors the IronWolf Pro.

Software and Accessories

Seagate offers SeaTools and DiscWizard to help monitor and maintain drive health and to assist with cloning and imaging, respectively. The IronWolf Pro additionally has IronWolf Health Management (IHM) for additional health monitoring and recovery for these drives. Combined with the recovery services, this helps set the IronWolf Pro apart from the Red Pro. 

A Closer Look

The Seagate IronWolf adheres to the 3.5" form factor and features a 6 Gb/s SATA connection that lends wide compatibility. The IronWolf Pro has an interesting label with a branding logo that resembles a wolf - or a mountain. Seagate does not use any sort of flash technology in this drive as WD does in its Red Pro, so internally, it has the typical spindle and drive controllers and a 256MB DRAM cache. 

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Comparison Products

We compared the 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro to the 14TB Toshiba X300 and the 12TB WD Red Plus. We also included our suite of 8TB hard drives, including the 8TB WD Blue, the older HGST UltraStar He8, the Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB, the Seagate FireCuda, and the Seagate BarraCuda. Larger 20TB drives in the test pool include the WD Red Pro, the Seagate Exos X20, the Seagate IronWolf Pro, and the Seagate SkyHawk AI.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

Any of the best SSDs on the market will provide far better performance in gaming applications. However, for those with voluminous game libraries, having a comparatively cheap and deep storage device with good-enough performance can be a win.  

The IronWolf Pro is close to the top in 3DMark, although the FireCuda is the better deal for general performance. The downside is that it’s only available at 4TB and 8TB capacities.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The IronWolf Pro doesn’t do as well in PCMark 10, but it is up against larger 20TB drives that have higher performance metrics. The exception is the FireCuda which, again, is an excellent HDD for desktop PCs. 

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

While reading back our files, the IronWolf Pro's performance is excellent as it takes the lead over competitors, but file copy performance is mediocre. Given its capacity, this is not a terrible result, but the FireCuda again appears to be the better option for daily desktop PC use.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The IronWolf Pro's sequential performance is good in ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark. Again, the biggest surprise is the FireCuda, an excellent desktop HDD. Performance in random workloads is a different story, but the IronWolf Pro still manages to fall somewhere in the middle. This is one area where the Red Pro will likely remain dominant over the IronWolf Pro. 

Sustained Write Performance

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most HDDs implement a write cache which is a fast area of volatile memory such as DRAM. Sustained write speeds directly hit the platters and tend to be consistent. There are exceptions to both of these statements, as there are SSHDs (flash-containing hybrid HDDs), OptiNAND drives, and SMR drives that deviate from the traditional configuration. We use Iometer to detect the maximum sustained write speed of the HDD.

Sustained write performance is sufficiently good on the IronWolf Pro, and it reaches its specified 255 MB/s and maintains that speed with little variation due to its CMR technology. This is a significant advantage over SMR-equipped drives, like the 8TB Seagate BarraCuda, that suffer from inconsistent performance. 

Power Consumption

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Some drives can consume watts of power at idle, while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

The IronWolf Pro’s power results fall where expected for a 14TB hard drive, and its efficiency is fairly good, being close to the 12TB Red Plus. There’s little not to like about this drive. 

Test Bench and Testing Notes

Conclusion

Even though it's designed primarily for NAS, the Seagate IronWolf Pro is a solid all-around drive. The IronWolf Pro's performance is not incredible, but it's good enough for its capacity, and Seagate's support for this drive is excellent. Current pricing, particularly for the 14TB model, is quite competitive.

The Seagate FireCuda is the better desktop PC hard drive, but it is only available at up to 8TB of capacity. Alternative hard drives at 14TB seem less compelling, whether NAS or not, with only the WD Red Pro being an alternative option for NAS.

If you want more capacity for your desktop PC, it's difficult to recommend the Toshiba X300 over the IronWolf Pro. The BarraCuda Pro is the better choice, but it currently costs more than the IronWolf Pro. The lesser NAS drives, like the regular non-pro IronWolf and WD Red Plus, are workable but lack the full warranty and recovery service. The Red Pro is still in play with its 512MB cache at 14TB and its better random read performance, but it is not without its own shortcomings.

Alternatively, the WD Black is a solid choice, depending on pricing. One final alternative is Seagate's Exos series, but these drives are designed for enterprise environments and have the price tag to match. The IronWolf Pro is the better compromise for use in a NAS, or a desktop PC for that matter. Seagate's IronWolf Health Management and data recovery services are an advantage that others simply don't match. We can easily recommend the IronWolf Pro for high-capacity applications, although the FireCuda is the better option for desktop PCs if you can get by with 8TB of capacity.

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Kioxia and Western Digital Corp are advancing their merger negotiations and finalizing the agreement specifics, according to a Reuters report citing two informed sources. The two companies are currently ranked as the world's second- and fourth-largest makers of NAND memory, according to TrendForce. So if Western Digital brings Kioxia into the fold, the combined company will become the largest supplier of flash memory.

If the two companies reach an agreement, 43% of the new entity will be owned by Kioxia, 37% will be owned by Western Digital, and the remaining 20% will be owned by existing owners, according to the report. It is noteworthy that Toshiba continues to hold a 40.6% stake in Kioxia, so it would still be a significant shareholder of the new entity.

Although Kioxia and Western Digital jointly produce NAND memory, their business strategies are somewhat different. Kioxia is focused on selling memory, whereas Western Digital is focused on selling NAND-based products, including some of the best SSDs available today. 

Kioxia, which was previously Toshiba Memory, was bought out from Toshiba Corp for $18 billion in 2018 by a consortium led by Bain Capital. In the face of the deteriorating flash-memory market, Kioxia has postponed plans for an initial public offering. Therefore, selling the unit to Western Digital, which co-develops process technologies and co-owns fabs with Kioxia, is a way for investors to get their money back amid a tough market due to falling NAND prices. 

Previous attempts to merge Kioxia and Western Digital in 2021 fell through due to various issues, including differences in valuation. However, news of renewed merger discussions re-surfaced in January. Still, no decision has been made and the details could change, the report stresses.

Kioxia commanded a 19.1% NAND memory market share in Q4 2022, whereas Western Digital had a 16.1% market share, according to TrendForce. Samsung, meanwhile, shipped 33.8% of the NAND memory sold in Q4. Therefore, a company that combines Kioxia's and Western Digital's flash businesses would be the world's largest supplier of NAND, ahead of Samsung and SK hynix.

Some analysts questioned by Reuters also think that Kioxia and Western Digital may be more exposed to fluctuations in the NAND flash market, compared to South Korea-based makers, Samsung and SK hynix.

Seagate has been hit with a massive $300 million fine by the U.S. Department of Commerce [PDF] for violating export control restrictions imposed on Huawei in 2020. The report shows that the U.S. Department of Commerce states that Seagate shipped millions of hard drives to Huawei in 2020 – 2021 and become the sole supplier of HDDs to the company while its rivals Toshiba and Western Digital refrained to work with the conglomerate. 

Seagate shipped 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei on 429 occasions between August 2020 and September 2021 without obtaining an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Those drives were worth around $1.104 billion back then, a significant sum for Seagate, which revenue totaled $10.681 billion in 2021.

To settle the matter, Seagate has agreed to pay the $300 million fine in quarterly instalments of $15 million over five years starting in October 2023. The civil penalty of $300 million is more than double the estimated net profits that Seagate made from the alleged illegal exports to or involving Huawei, according to BIS. In fact, $300 million is a record fine for BIS.

"Today's action is the consequence: the largest standalone administrative resolution in our agency's history," said Matthew S. Axelrod, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement. "This settlement is a clarion call about the need for companies to comply rigorously with BIS export rules, as our enforcement team works to ensure both our national security and a level playing field."

As of mid-August 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security mandated that any company planning to sell semiconductor hardware, software, equipment, or any other asset using American intellectual property to Huawei and its entities must obtain a special export license. The export controls on Huawei mostly pertain to semiconductors. However, Seagate's hard drives also fall under the export-controlled items category because they use controllers and memory designed with electronic design automation tools developed by American companies and produced using U.S.-made equipment.

These export licenses were subject to a presumption of denial policy, meaning they were difficult to obtain. However, multiple companies were granted appropriate licenses between 2020 and 2022, which allowed Huawei to acquire various products that were developed or manufactured in the United States. 

Seagate did not apply for an appropriate license and said in September, 2020, that its drives could be shipped to Huawei without a license, an opinion that was not shared by its rival Western Digital. Since Huawei was not supposed to get HDDs at all, republican senator Roger Wicker wondered in mid-2021 how exactly the sanctioned company obtained such storage devices and whether three global makers of hard drives complied with the export rules.

As it turned out, although Toshiba and Western Digital ceased to sell HDDs to Huawei, Seagate continued to do so. In fact, the company became Huawei's exclusive hard drive supplier and even signed a three-year Strategic Cooperation Agreement and then a Long-Term Agreement to purchase over five million HDDs with the Chinese conglomerate in 2021.  

"Even after Huawei was placed on the Entity List for conduct inimical to our national security, and its competitors had stopped selling to them due to our foreign direct product rule, Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei," said Axelrod.

The HDD maker has also committed to conducting three compliance audits to ensure it adheres to Export Administration Regulations. One of the audits will be conducted by an independent third-party consultant chosen by Seagate.

Sales of hard disk drives in the first quarter dropped by a whopping 35% year-over-year in Q1 2023 as PC and consumer electronics (CE) makers remained cautious getting new hardware due to uncertain demand. But the most surprising event during the quarter was continued shrinkage of nearline HDD shipments, the most lucrative part of the hard drive market.

Unit Shipments Down, Exabytes Shipments Dow

Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital shipped estimated 33.5 and 34.9 million HDD units, a 35% year-over-year decline, according to numbers from Trendfocus published by Blocks & Files.  

Nearline HDDs have been bread and butter for hard drive makers for a while given their consistently increasing per-drive capacities. But in Q1 2023 only 10.2 million of such drives were shipped, down from 18.8 million from Q1 2022 and 10.51 million in Q4 2022. On the capacity side of matters, such drives shipped was around 157EBs, declining by 36% year-over-year (YoY) and 1% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). 

Seagate believes that the nearline HDD shipments are poised to grow in the future as their consumers (read: exascalers) expect their businesses to prosper. 

"I will say for the medium-term, long-term, we don't see any difference," said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate, at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference (via SeekingAlpha). "I think they are very confident their business is going to grow as they were expecting they need to manage their short term down cycle and with no in some cases, in some cases, this inventory build-up, but we don't see any change in the long-term view." 

As far as PC and CE-oriented drives are concerned, their shipments totaled 23.3 to 24.7 million units, a decline of 24% - 33% depending on the exact segment. The 2.5-inch HDD segmented recorded a yet another major year-over year decline of 33%. This decrease highlights the ongoing trend of hard drives PC and CE market share declining, so this was not a particularly surprising thing.

Seagate Retains Top Spot

As far as shipments of individual vendors are concerned, Seagate sold estimated 15 – 15.5 million hard drives and maintained its market share of around 44.8%, according to Storage Newsletter that cites numbers from Trendfocus. 

Western Digital reportedly supplied some 12.2 – 12.7 million HDDs and commanded an approximately 36.4% share. Toshiba remained a distant third with an estimated shipment of 6.3 – 6.7 million units and a roughly 19% market share. 

A new report from Trendfocus shines a light on the carnage in the mechanical storage industry as we start 2023. The Storage Newsletter shared an excerpt from the Trendfocus research work, which spans 2022 and covers the largest HDD storage providers, their shipments, and their market shares. All suffered dramatic declines in shipments over the past year, with Seagate and WDC seeing their shipments almost halve.

According to this data, the worst market performer is the biggest member of the HDD industry triumvirate. Seagate’s HDD shipments dropped as much as 43.7% last year, and WDC was almost as bad, with a 43.0% slide over the same period. However, Toshiba was by no means unscathed by 2022, with the scale of its HDD shipments declining in the same ballpark as its rivals, with shipments falling at as much as 39.3% YoY.

Shipments for the industry also fell as much as 42.5% over the year to approximately 35 or 36 million units. Naturally, the industry can’t take a beating like this for too many years before it becomes unsustainable and HDDs are interned in the graveyard of tech. However, this is largely the result of inventory corrections and a cooling economy. 

In addition to the overall market trends and consideration of the fortunes of each of the big three HDD makers, the market analysts considered three HDD segments separately. Trendfocus reckons the biggest current woe for HDD storage makers is the fall in enterprise cloud storage business demand. A combination of cloud storage firm mergers and inventory corrections meant that this segment “cut nearline shipments to between 10 and 11 million units in CQ4 2022.”

Moving along to 3.5-inch desktop and consumer HDDs, the single-digit percentage drops observed weren’t awful but showed no green shoots of recovery to be grateful for. The 3.5-inch HDD sellers were hoping for a tick-up in the surveillance market and an end to the consumer confidence slump in Q4 2022 – both of which never materialized.

Lastly, 2.5-inch HDDs showed a glimmer of light with a 15% QoQ rebound into Q4. We question whether or not there is always a Q4 rebound due to the holiday gifting season.

We recently reported on half-terabyte HDDs and SSDs hitting price parity. In that report, TrendForce (not to be confused with Trendfocus) delivered some very gloomy news to the laptop HDD industry, saying that 92% of laptops sold in 2022 had SSDs, with the proportion expected to grow to 96% in 2023.

Cloud storage company Backblaze is at it again, providing consumers with interesting, practical data on what they can expect from their hard disk drive (HDD) investments. In this case, the company looked at life expectancy data for all the major-brand HDDs within its servers, including products from companies likeHGST, Seagate, Toshiba and WDC (Western Digital). This, statistically at least, answers that all-important question of "how long will this hard drive last me?" The results? As we've been showing you over years of reviews and Best Pick articles, there's more to a product than its sticker price and brand-name might suggest. Mileage across HDD brands varies wildy - sometimes even among models and across capacities . Backblaze was generous enough to provide data on various 4 TB, 8 TB, 12 TB and 14 TB hard drives.

Backblaze took its analysis as far back as April 2013, and analyzed all hard drives they've commissioned into work in a high enough number that allowed them to apply the Kaplan-Meier life expectancy curve. This curve, which has its roots in biological science, takes into account the number of subjects that have survived a treatment among all those that received it. There's no issue in applying it to other fields - as it often is. In the case of Backblaze's analysis, the "treatment" is the moment these hard drives start running. Unsurprisingly, some of them did die before the deadline for the gathered data,  March 31st 2022.

Backblaze's analysis for 4 TB hard drives focused on two models: The HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 (sold as HGST MegaScale) and the Seagate ST4000DM000 (sold simply as a desktop HDD, which were operational from 2013 through 2015. As a note, HGST was absorbed by Western Digital Corporation (WDC) back in 2012, but hard drives with their stickers are still available for purchase.

Looking at Backblaze's graph, one would think that buying a 4 TB Seagate HDD would be bad idea; that drop is scary, even if does mean that 81% of the Seagate drives survived. You can also look at these life expectancy rates from another angle: 81% of the drives surviving means that 19 out of every 100 Seagate drives failed. As to HGST, 97 out of 100 usrvived.

Compared to HGST's much more respectable 97% survival rate, Darwin's survival of the fittest term comes to mind. But as you know, there are many more things that go into a purchase decision other than "How long will this part last me?".

Things like "How does it perform?", "How easy is it to buy" and more importantly, "How much does it cost?" are unavoidable questions for consumers looking for the best bang for their buck.

In this case, the HGST drives cost between 1.2 and 1.5 times more than the equivalent-capacity Seagate. The Seagate drives were also easier for Backblaze to purchase. We also have to take into account product positioning: HGST's drive belongs in the Enterprise segment, where reliability is paramount. The same isn't true for the "Desktop HDD" Seagate drives. These elements help explain both the difference in cost and the higher reliability of one drive over the other, and highlight the difficulties in choosing the right piece of hardware for any one of us.

Backblaze, of course, has other metrics they have to consider. While the average consumer would simply swap the failed drive and be done with it, Backblaze's scale means they replaced around 4,200 more failed Seagate drives than the HGST counterpart - 700 more drives a year, or around two more drives per day. At an estimated 30-40 minutes per day, that's a lot in technician-hours.

At 8 TB, Backblaze compared two Seagate drives: the consumer-geared ST8000DM002, and the enterprise-focused, Seagate Exos-branded ST8000NM0055. What's most interesting between these models is that they defy your expectations: The consumer drive showcases a better life expectancy than the enterprise model! 

At odds with the general product segmentation - and sometimes mission-critical usage of Enterprise drives - this means that the two-year warranty on the first drive is slapped on a model that's actually more reliable than the five-year-protected Exos drive. In general, Backblaze's data shows that 95% of the consumer-geared "Desktop HDD" survived, compared ot 93.6% of the Exos models.

For the more data-driven users that either take large numbers of photographs (like me), work with content production, or generally just want to have more available space for their media or household backups, 12 TB drives is where the business gets serious. In this category, Backblaze again compared drives from Seagate - the Exos X14 (ST12000NM0008) and the Exos X16 (ST12000NM001G) against one HGST drive, the HGST HUH721212ALN604, (which may also be found with a Western Digital sticker, by the way).

As a rule of thumb, the higher the drive capacity, the more recently it was manufactured. With that in mind, evolving technology in the HDD space means that these have much better life expectancy rates than the lower-capacity ones. All three models showed a 98% life expectancy, and all of them carry the same five-year warranty. With the survival scores being what they are, that's one less factor to consider when choosing the best model for you. You can now give more weight to pricing and/or performance.

As for the 14 TB models, Backblaze managed to compare life expectancy for all three major HDD brands operating today: Toshiba (MG07ACA14TA, enterprise); WDC (WUH721414ALE6L4, marketed as the UltraStar DC HC 530); and Seagate's Exos X16 again (ST14000NM001G). All of them showcased excellent reliability, with an over 99% life expectancy across brands. Seagate once again was trailing the other manufacturers, but the margin here is so slim that it's mostly negligible. Compare 1% failure rates for Seagate's 14 TB HDD with the 19% failures of the 4 TB model mentioned in this article, and you'll see how far the company - and HDD tech in general - has come.

But that third place may be at risk of change, as the acceleration of failure rates in the Toshiba drives (the red line) does suggest increased failures than would be expected starting from around the 20-month mark. That's something to keep in mind, and also something Backblaze is likely to cover in future blog posts.

All in all, Backblaze's data provides an interesting, data-supported insight into the world of HDDs from its position as a cloud provider. Consumers too have interesting insights they can glean from these numbers: It seems that Western Digital disks are generally more reliable than Seagate's, although again, pricing is king when failure rates are as low as they are for models starting from the 12 TB mark.

That consumers can still find HSGT-branded hard drives in the market for the lowest capacity options showcases the fact that higher-capacity HDDs are far more likely to have a more recent manufacturing date, taking advantage of improvements to manufacturing technologies. That all by itself might be a good reason to pay a bit more and opt for higher capacity HDDs--especially if you're just buying a drive or two to store data you don't want to lose. But don't forget to back that data up, preferably in multiple places, with one off-site to safeguard against natural disasters.

Following a historic 33% decline in shipments year over year (YoY), the HDD market in 2Q 2022 seems to be on the verge of an apocalypse - or at least standing at the doors to purgatory. As reported by Storage Newsletter, weakening demand on the client side prompted this faltering shipment situation for one of the longest-lived storage mediums. Density increase achievements aren't enough to buoy this particular market.

HDD shipments across the various market segments (client and enterprise) only totaled 45 million units - a far cry from the 2010 peak of 651 million units (an average of 162 million units per quarter).

Enterprise HDDs remained relatively flat, with a slight reduction in demand compared to the same period last year. But that's a market that's been consistently growing for years and which is sure to remain growing as Cloud and High Performance Computing) environments require cheap, low-power, high-density storage that can cope with the increased digitization of our lives and scientific achievements.

The biggest change was in the 2.5" form-factor, which saw a staggering 40% drop quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) to around 11 million units. The drop is explained by weak retail shipments and a softening mobility market that has largely shifted to flash-based storage solutions.

The second highest loss in the HDD market is in the Desktop/Consumer Electronics segment, where shipments fell by over 30% to 17 million units. Particular demand weakness was seen in the surveillance, PC and retail sectors. This demand reduction relates not only to macroeconomics; there are more important things to spend one's money on when inflation is at 8.6% in the US alone. But it also stems from the demand decrease in the PC space, whose shipments should reach a yearly decrease of 8.2% compared to 2021. We should also note that storage-based cryptocurrency Chia launched around March of last year, prompting a spike in demand for HDDs throughout Q2. There's no data on how exactly this impacted overall HDD shipments, so it's hard to gauge how responsible (at all) it is for increasing the YoY delta.

"SSDs killed the HDD star" is another likely element, as price reduction for SSDs is certainly increasing their value proposition for system integrators and consumers. NAND manufacturers dropped wafer prices for TLC and QLC NAND by 8~13% in Q2 2022, and a further 5~10% reduction is expected for Q3. With lowered SSD pricing and quality of life improvements compared to HDDs with their winding, spinning platters and lesser durability, the value proposition for the consumer side is jumbled even further.

CORRECTION (5/17/2022): YMTC says that the PE310 and PE320 are not controllers but the model numbers of SSDs it produces. The company is not disclosing what controllers these drives use and who makes them so we have no way of knowing whether the company is in-fact developing its controllers or not. The original article text is below.

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All leading makers of 3D NAND memory have their in-house developed controllers for solid-state drives that power their own-brand SSDs. Being a considerably smaller 3D NAND manufacturer, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. is following in the steps of its larger rivals by designing its own SSD controllers. Recently two of these controllers passed PCI Express compliance validation at a PCI-SIG workshop.

YMTC's family of PCI-SIG-validated SSD controllers currently include models PE310 and PE320, though there may be other controllers that are not listed in the PCI-SIG Integrators List. Both controllers feature a PCIe 4.0 x4 host interface and are designed for higher-end drives. Since both chips have the same host interface, we can speculate that they support a differing number of NAND flash channels. 

Speaking of NAND channels, it is necessary to note that one advantage that YMTC's 3D NAND chips have over rivals is their ultra-fast interface. This benefit is enabled by the company's Xtacking technology, which entails manufacturing a 3D NAND memory array and a NAND logic (address decoding, page buffers, etc.) on two different wafers and then bonding them together. YMTC once said that its Xtacking could enable I/O speeds of 3 GT/s (up from 1.6 ~ 2.0 GT/s data transfer rate on today's 3D NAND chips from companies like Samsung or SK Hynix), so building a controller that supports this transfer rate could incredibly fast SSDs (that may even end up in our list of the best SSDs available today).

Historically, among makers of 2D and then 3D NAND, only Samsung and Intel designed SSD controllers in-house, whereas other leading manufacturers of flash memory left the development of SSD controllers to third parties. In many cases, lousy combinations of NAND, controller, and firmware led to inferior drives.  

But as the SSD market grew from tens of millions of units in the late 2000s to hundreds of millions of units in 2015 and 3D NAND and SSD architectures got more complex, all makers of NAND memory (except Toshiba, which owned a stake in Phison) initiated the development of SSD controllers in-house. These are two key reasons why makers of memory started to develop their own SSD controllers:

• New generations of 3D NAND memory require very advanced error correction and signal processing algorithms. For obvious reasons, developers of 3D NAND devices can bring together a particular set of algorithms to a particular 3D NAND IC better than a third party. Also, new generations of SSDs require more sophisticated bad block management, end-to-end data path protection, advanced security functions and many other technologies that have to be prudently implemented, keeping capabilities of particular 3D NAND ICs in mind.
• Meticulous integration of 3D NAND memory, controller, and firmware allows making fast and reliable drives, something that consumers and OEMs demand. Selling tens of millions of SSD is far more profitable than selling millions of 3D NAND wafers or tons 3D NAND chips.

YMTC clearly has similar motives as other suppliers of 3D NAND memory, so the development of own-brand controllers (or even ordering custom controllers from a third party and then enabling exclusive features) is an entirely logical and expected move from a Chinese 3D NAND producer. 

YMTC previously collaborated with Phison and Silicon Motion to enable turnkey SSD solutions and its own-brand drives. We fully expect the company to continue working with both controller developers in the future. In fact, Samsung is the only maker of 3D NAND that does not sell its SSD-graded memory on the open market. Other manufacturers supply their chips to various SSD makers, which is why they also have to work with SMI and Phison to ensure compatibility with controllers.

While the capacity of hard disk drives increased from 10TB in 2016 to 20TB in 2021, the areal recording density of high-capacity HDDs hasn't increased nearly as much. Areal density is stagnating, observed Tom Gardner, a technology and intellectual property consultant as well as webmaster at IEEE Silicon Valley History Committee.

The report notes that areal recording density of HDDs has been sitting at around 1.1 Tbit/inch^2 (that's terabits per square-inch) for the past several years (via StorageNewsletter). Furthermore, manufacturers of hard drives no longer highlight this metrics in their specifications. It's still increasing, but far slowly than in the past.

Historically, makers of hard drives and HDD platters bragged about the record areal densities achieved either for commercial products or in their labs. But as the transition to energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies is taking longer than expected, we no longer see HDD makers advertising this metric. It's similar to how CPU designers have ceased to highlight processor frequencies.

Could this be some fundamental shift in hard drive evolution, or is it just a minor hiccup? It's probably a bit of both, actually.

Perpendicular magnetic recording has been running out of steam for quite a while, which is why Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital started using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) as well as two-dimensional magnetic recording (TMDR) technologies in the recent years. While these two technologies allow for increased areal density, they alone cannot enable tangible increases in nearline HDD capacity every year.

To overcome this, all manufacturers have also increased the number of platters from seven to nine in their range-topping drives in recent years. Many are either shipping or are getting ready to ship 10-platter HDDs in the coming quarters.

There's nothing bad in packing more platters into nearline hard drives, provided their power consumption and heat dissipation stay in check and they continue to be drop-in compatible with the existing 3.5-inch infrastructure. In fact, in some cases it may even make more sense for HDD makers to lower their areal density a bit and increase the number of platters if that improves yields, reliability, or both. According to Coughlin Associates, areal density of HDDs has been fluctuating in the recent years.

Still, fewer platters is preferable from a cost point of view, which is why Seagate and Western Digital have been gradually re-introducing their mid-range parts (8TB~12TB) with new high-capacity platters and using TMDR and other innovations.

EAMR Needed

In the recent quarters, Seagate and Toshiba promised to introduce their next-generation heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) HDDs. Those technologies would help increase capacity to get to 50TB by the middle of this decade. In both cases, usage of new recording technologies is pivotal for the capacity gain.

Toshiba is shipping its MAMR-based HDDs and Western Digital offers its energy-assisted PMR (ePMR) drives, but Seagate so far only supplies its first-generation HAMR HDDs inside its own Lyve storage systems, or to select clients. Furthermore, the capacity of these EAMR drives does not exceed 20TB, which means that their areal density is barely higher when compared to regular PMR+TDMR offerings, so we continue to stagnate at 1.1–1.2 Tbit/inch^2.

Seagate once said that its HAMR technology can support areal densities of 1.5–2.6 Tb/inch^2 with a path to grow to 6 Tb/inch^2 by 2030 to enable 100TB 3.5-inch HDDs. However, we are not even close to that, and before Seagate starts shipping of its HAMR drives for the mass market, it does not look like we are going to see any breakthroughs with HDD development.

HAMR requires all-new glass platters with a brand-new magnetic layer, all-new heads, and numerous changes to the internal design of HDDs, which is why it's taking Seagate so much time for this technology. By contrast, Toshiba and Western Digital are taking a considerably more conservative approach with their MAMR and ePMR technologies that do not require so many changes at once, allowing a very gradual and less risky development . They also come at the cost of lower capacity increases and a and slower transition to HAMR, naturally.

Ultimately, while 10-platter HDDs are here and it is possible to increase the number of platters within a drive to offer a yet another capacity step, more is needed. If companies are to restart the rapid growth in HDD areal density and capacity, EAMR technologies are needed.

Modern magnetic recording media, the building block of HDDs, has higher durability than most modern NAND flash memory used in SSDs. However, controversial workload ratings imposed by HDD makers to diversify their product portfolio make the latest NAS-bound hard drives less reliable than even cheap SSDs, much less the best SSDs on the market.

There are several breeds of HDDs available today: enterprise-grade drives rated for a 550TB workload per year, enterprise NAS-grade drives rated for a 300TB workload per year, and desktop PC drives rated for 180TB per year or so. Solid-state drives do not have per-year workload ratings but feature terabytes to be written (TBW) and drive writes per day (DWPD) endurance ratings that you can use to calculate the total endurance.

ServeTheHome recently compared the latest Western Digital WD Red Pro 20TB NAS hard drive's 300TB annual workload (which includes reads and writes) to the endurance ratings for modern SSDs. The WD Red Pro comes with a five-year limited warranty, so it is designed to withstand a workload of 1,500TB (including reads and writes). Competing IronWolf Pro HDDs from Seagate have a similar workload rating, and the same applies to products from Toshiba.

In contrast, the endurance of Western Digital's own 2TB WD_Black SN850 SSD is 1,200TB over five years, whereas a 4TB WD Red SA500 NAS SATA SSD is rated for 2,500TB over five years, which is higher than the Red Pro 20TB. Both of these WD_Black and WD Red SSDs cater to mixed and read-intensive workloads, so we aren't even talking about enterprise-grade SSDs for write-intensive workloads. For example, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN840 6.4TB drive is suitable for 35,000TB written over five years.

Needless to say, if we compare endurance ratings of SSDs and HDDs in terms of endurance per terabyte of capacity, SSDs will win again. Does this mean that SSDs are now more durable than HDDs in terms of the possible amount of data that could be written? Well, yes and no.

The actual HDD platters are still considerably more reliable than NAND flash media simply because modern 3D TLC NAND is rated for about 10,000 program/erase cycles. SSD makers have to use very sophisticated controllers supporting these tricky coding and error correction algorithms to improve endurance at the device level.

By contrast, magnetic media (the coating on the platters) can be re-written practically without any limits (at least with no limits worth mentioning). But modern hard drives use high-precision mechanics and motors that spin at 5,000 – 7,200 RPM. While they are reliable, they are fragile and sometimes fail, which is why hard drive makers introduced workload ratings to their products several years ago.

HDDs and SSDs in data centers are used in tiered storage subsystems and in RAID mode to store data reliably. In any case, we cannot say that one type of storage device is more reliable than another — they all can fail and require safety measures to store data reliably.

But judging only by workload and TBW ratings, SSDs are at least as reliable as NAS-oriented WD Red Pro HDDs. Of course, datacenter-bound hard drives feature higher-endurance ratings and are for essentially 2,750 TBW over five years, but datacenter SSDs for write-intensive workloads can beat even them.

While HDDs and SSDs have pros and cons, it is essential not to rely on a single device to store your data. While workload, TBW, and DWPD ratings are crucial, you should not rely on just one metric for reliable storage, as you need more than one device to ensure the safety of your data.

An email from Western Digital to its product partners has surfaced, bringing to light the harsh reality they will face in the wake of a significant contamination accident that resulted in the loss of 6.5 exabytes of its popular 3D BiCS NAND flash products. A Western Digital executive told partners "costs have increased significantly in the short term" and that it would "immediately increase the price of all Flash products."

Western Digital and Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) reported that inspections of their 3D BiCS production lines in Yokkaichi and Kitakami discovered impurities that made the NAND flash unusable. Western Digital said up to 6.5 exabytes of flash was contaminated, which is a devastating blow to the industry when coupled with the two- to three-month process required to construct a 3D NAND chip. 

We are now hearing that Kioxia could have lost even more product, as it usually outpaces Western Digital for output. Summing up the totals, perhaps 14 exabytes of 3D NAND flash memory had to be scrapped. It's estimated that this accounts for nearly a quarter of the joint venture's Q1 2022 NAND output.

Elsewhere in its email, Western Digital pledged to keep partners updated regarding its flash NAND production. Furthermore, it promised to assist with sales and promotion to help partners get through the "unexpected event."

The email confirmed that Western Digital is immediately increasing flash prices, which TrendForce previously indicated could rise 5% to 10% in Q2 2022. It is also highly likely that its partners, like SSD makers, will pass those costs on, even if they already hold sizable inventories. Western Digital and Kioxia have about a 35% market share for NAND, so the price move will likely have a significant impact on the market.

According to a DigiTimes report today, it looks like we can already see some incoming aftershocks. The Taiwanese industry journal cites industry insiders saying that other NAND makers, and device makers employing NAND, are expected to mirror Western Digital's price increases.

Western Digital's contamination event is the latest in a string of bad news coming from the sector. In January, we heard that China's Tsinghua srapped its plans for sizable 3D NAND fabs, which would have helped drive costs down. Moreover, as we transitioned from 2021 to 2022, news broke about Samsung cutting NAND flash output due to a surge in COVID-19 cases among its employees at a major production facility in Xi'an, China.

Have Consumer SSD Prices Moved Yet?

Last but not least, with all the talk of NAND flash price increases, we thought it was worth a look at current SSD prices for PCs. Checking over 1TB SSDs (WD, Crucial, Samsung) available in the U.S., prices are tracking at, or near to, all-time lows. So if you think you will need some extra storage soon, it is perhaps worth grabbing it now, out of caution. And you can make an informed purchase decision by taking a look at our Best SSD and Hard Drive Deals 2022 feature.

Toshiba's next-generation 20TB hard drives may be just around the corner as the company's yet-to-be-announced MG10-series nearline hard drives have passed SATA interoperability validation tests. In addition to nearline HDDs, the company will also offer 20TB drives for desktops and NAS.   

Toshiba's latest 18TB hard drives for nearline applications belong to the MG09 family of HDDs that rely on the company's 9-platter helium-filled platform featuring flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. The company's next-generation HDDs — which will likely belong to the MG10-series — are expected to use a brand-new platform with 10 FC-MAMR disks, based on the company's mid-term HDD roadmap published earlier this week. 

The mid-term HDD roadmap indicates that Toshiba will launch its 10-platter FC-MAMR 20TB HDD in its fiscal year 2021, which ends on March 31, 2021. Toshiba's MG-series drives for nearline applications are the first to adopt the company's latest technologies. In addition, they will be the first products to use the 10-disk platform to offer a 20TB capacity. That said, it is not surprising that MG10-series drives already received validation for interoperability (given that they have an unveiling within the next few weeks). 

But the most significant intrigue about the upcoming announcement is not even the 20TB capacity. Instead, it is about model numbers with the F derivative. Toshiba has a particular model numbering scheme for hard drives, as stated in the table below. The fourth character always characterizes height. In the case of standard 3.5-inch drives, it is 26.1 mm and carries the A designation. In the case of the upcoming MG10-series, their drives with their height have the F designation.

Given how hyper scalers buy hard drives, F may mean nothing, yet this thing is worth attention, even in an imprecise form. 

SATA-IO, the organization that oversees the development and adoption of the Serial ATA technology, already lists Toshiba's MG10 and MG10F-series HDDs in its integrators list, which means that the drives have passed SATA interoperability testing. In addition to enterprise-grade offerings, the lineup of HDDs validated under the MG10 and MG10F monikers also includes MN10 drives for NAS (HDWG-series for retail products) as well as MD10 drives for desktops (HDWR-series for retail drives). 

Update 2/10/2022, 3am PT: Analyst firm TrendForce has now reported that the incident could cause NAND flash prices to spike 5 to 10% in Q2, which will ultimately impact SSD pricing. We've added more information below:

Amended Article:

Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) and Western Digital have reported that unspecified contamination issues have impacted several of their joint NAND production factories. Western Digital says the problems impact up to 6.5 exabytes of flash memory, but Kioxia has yet to give an estimate of the impact. Given the severity of the disruptions, TrendForce predicts a 5 to 10% price increase for flash in the second quarter of this year, ultimately impacting SSD and NAND flash-based products. However, this prediction only accounts for Western Digital's lost production capacity and could increase when Kioxia releases firm estimates of the impact on its own production. 

Kioxia and Western Digital operate several NAND production factories as part of their 20-year-old joint venture. However, two of those plants, the Yokkaichi and Kiakami factories in Japan, have apparently ceased production due to the contamination.

Kioxia's statement says the issue impacts the production of its 3D BiCS flash, a product used in a wide range of SSDs and other products, but 2D flash production is not impacted. The company hopes for an "early recovery to normal operation," indicating that production has been halted. However, Kioxia did not indicate how much of its production capacity has been impacted.

Western Digital's statement provides a bit more detail, saying that the issue will reduce its production by "at least" 6.5 exabytes. Unfortunately, neither company has given a firm timeline of when production will be fully restored. However, given the long cycle times for 3D NAND flash (it can take two to three months to manufacture a 3D flash chip), any disruption will still have an impact for several months after production restarts.

We reached out to Western Digital, but the company has declined to provide any further details. We are also waiting for further clarification from Kioxia. As such, it isn't clear if any of the contaminated NAND has already shipped in products, which would eventually lead to recalls.

According to TrendForce, Western Digital and Kioxia account for 32.5% of the overall NAND flash market output, and this incident impacts 13% of the Q1 output. Western Digital is the leading supplier of both SSDs and eMMC products, so we can expect those to be the most impacted. 

The Kioxia and Western Digital shutdowns come on the heels of Samsung's recent plant shutdowns due to Covid restrictions, all of which could ultimately lead to price hikes for NAND-based products, like SSDs and other flash memory devices.

For perspective, according to TrendFocus, the cumulative capacity shipped for both consumer and enterprise SSDs in 2021 weighed in at 207 exabytes spread over roughly 333 million SSDs. The Yokkaichi site has six factories and spans 694,000 meters with 6,300 employees. The Kitakami site consists of several factories, with a new K2 manufacturing facility under construction that will add an additional 136,000 square meters of production space.

We'll update you as more details become available. 

Toshiba this week outlined its aggressive hard disk drive road-map for the next five years via a Business Wire press release. The company expects to rapidly increase the capacity of its HDDs for nearline applications by adopting next-generation recording technologies as well as increasing the number of platters per drive. The company's nearest plan is to introduce a 26TB hard drive by the end of fiscal 2022, which means in 14 months from now. Meanwhile, a 40+ TB HDD is expected by 2027. 

There are two ways to increase capacity of a hard drive: to use platters with higher areal recording density and/or install more platters into an HDD. Traditionally, hard drive makers use both methods. At present, Toshiba's highest-capacity HDDs are its 18TB products featuring nine aluminum platters that use flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. 

Toshiba's next step will be announcement of a 20TB HDD that will continue to rely on FC-MAMR disks, but will employ 10 of them to increase capacity. Development of a 20TB hard drive is a relatively straightforward move that will enable it to compete against 20TB HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital that have been shipping for several months now.  

But while Toshiba's 20TB HDD will be an important product as it will allow the company to test its 10-platter helium-filled platform, it is not exactly going to be a breakthrough product. Based on the company's newly-released public roadmap, Toshiba intends to quickly roll-out subsequent HDD models offering higher capacity.  

By the end of fiscal year 2022 that ends on March 31, 2023 (within the next 14 months), Toshiba will introduce its 10-platter 26TB HDD that will switch to microwave assisted switching MAMR (MAS-MAMR) technology enabled by platters developed by Showa Denko K.K. and heads designed by TDK. The company will maintain aggressive onward pace and intends to reveal an 11-platter 30TB drive in the following years (by the end of fiscal 2024, which ends on March 31, 2025). 

But starting from 30TB ~ 35TB, Toshiba considers moving to heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that is expected to enable long term evolution for HDDs. Toshiba says that HAMR will allow it to offer a hard drive with an over 40TB capacity after fiscal 2027, or roughly five years from now. 

It is important to point out that MAS-MAMR will require Toshiba to transit to all-new platters with brand-new magnetic layers as well as new read and write heads. HAMR will require Toshiba to transit to a yet another set of key components again, which will require collaborative work with its partners. Since multiple major technology transitions naturally pose risks, Toshiba does not plan to drop MAS-MAMR for quite some time after it starts using HAMR in the middle of the decade.

"Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers’ needs," said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President, Engineering & Product Marketing. "Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces TCO (total cost of ownership) of our nearline HDDs." 

One thing that is worth noting is that Toshiba positions its high-capacity HDDs based on leading-edge magnetic recording technology primarily for nearline applications. That said, it really remains to be seen whether technologies like MAS-MAMR and/or HAMR will be used for consumer-grade HDDs and if so when.

Cryptocurrency mining can now be undertaken on a very wide range of devices, from the humble Raspberry Pi 4 to custom mining rigs. But rarely do we see a rig as retro as this. This antique powered mining laptop is provided by retro computing enthusiast Dmitrii Eliuseev, who recently published a blog post explaining how he was using an old Toshiba T3200SX Laptop with a 16MHz Intel 386SX processor (not even a DX!) to mine for Bitcoin. By Eliuseev's own calculations, it will take the Toshiba 584M years to earn $1 in Bitcoin.

Before setting out on his quest to mine Bitcoin on the Toshiba T3200SX, Eliuseev pondered over the wide range of computing devices that have been put to the same money-making purpose. At the top of the pile of Bitcoin mining machines there are specially created ASIC-powered Bitcoin farms, and it has been some time since personal computers and PC components, however powerful, have been of practical use for directly mining BTC. Nevertheless, people have set up Bitcoin mining operations on devices as low-powered as smartphones, or SBCs like the Raspberry Pi — just for fun.

The Toshiba T3200SX dates from 1989, and its launch price of $6,299 ($13,896 in today's money) put it out of reach of most people. It boasted a 16MHz Intel 80386SX CPU, which was cutting edge at the time, especially for a portable/luggable machine.

The lack of available mining software prompted Eliuseev to code his own Bitcoin mining tool based for the SHA256 algorithm. During this process, he kept bumping up against the limits of the 16-bit DOS platform, but with hard work and patience he managed to create his own code, available via GitHub. This code can be compiled on a contemporary Windows machine using the free Open Watcom compiler before being shovelled back onto an old DOS machine like the Toshiba 386SX. Alternatively, interested users can compile the code on a contemporary PC using an MS-DOS compiler like Borland C++, in the DOSBox emulator, before transferring it.

Impressive results, but not in a good way

So, now we arrive at the answer to the big question of how fast this ancient 32-year old 386-powered laptop can mine Bitcoin. The answer is impressive, in the expanse of time it would take to complete enough work to earn a solitary dollar. According to Eliuseev's calculations, it would take the Toshiba 584M years to earn $1 in Bitcoin. That's thanks to a blistering 15 H/s hash rate — yes, hashes per second.

Running the Bitcoin mining task on the old laptop doesn't use too much electricity, relatively. It sucked about 39W when busying itself with the cryptomining task. However, according to a mining profitability calculator we checked, users would be losing approx $3.37 per month running this process, so the prospect of $1 income in nearly 600M years of mining is even more risible.

To put the 386-powered laptop's 15 H/s into proper perspective, it compares favorably against the likes of a Toshiba T1100 Plus model with a 7.1MHz 8086 CPU and 3.6 hashes/s, noted Eliuseev. Looking at something more modern, the retro tinkerer reckons that the tiny Raspberry Pi 4 can achieve "about 200 KH/s" — note that we haven't been able to verify that Raspberry Pi Bitcoin mining performance figure. Back when CPU mining of BTC was all the rage (i.e. up until mid-2011), CPUs like the i7-990X were already over a million times faster than the 80386SX. Today, a top-tier modern ASIC miner like the Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro can achieve 110 TH/s, only about 7 trillion times faster than the old Toshiba laptop.

Further demonstrating the cryptomining on anything/everything trend, in recent days Tom's Hardware has reported on various cryptocurrencies being mined on Tesla Cars, or in background processes on your PC installed by AV software. Someone please figure out how to mine Bitcoin on an old HP calculator like the one I used in high school.

Showa Denko K.K. (SDK), the world's largest independent maker of hard drive platters, has confirmed that it developed media featuring MAS-MAMR (microwave assisted switching-microwave assisted magnetic recording) technology. Eventually, this technology will allow Toshiba, one of the key customers of SDK, to build HDDs with capacities of over 30TB.

MAS-MAMR is essentially a superset of MAMR technology, which alters magnetic coercivity of hard drive media using microwaves. With MAS-MAMR, coercivity is altered even more significantly, allowing even narrower tracks and thus increased areal density. The technology was co-developed by Showa Denko (media with a brand-new magnetic), TDK (read/write heads equipped with dual spin-injection-layer), and Toshiba (drives). The three companies did not disclose the actual areal density, but they indicate that MAS-MAMR will enable Toshiba to build HDDs with over 30TB capacities. They also didn't say how many platters these drives will feature.

Changing platters and read/write heads is a big deal for HDD makers. Typically, companies prefer to change one crucial component of their drives, but with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), Seagate had to significantly alter the architecture of its hard drives. Apparently, Toshiba will have similar challenges with MAS-MAMR. Meanwhile, the good news is that the technology seems to scale, so it will be used for years to come.

Toshiba has already started shipments of MAMR-based 18TB HDDs for nearline and enterprise-grade NAS applications. MAS-MAMR platters and heads will be used for its second-generation MAMR drives. Unfortunately, Toshiba does not say when such drives will hit the market.

Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) is running out of steam, so manufacturers need to use various energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies to tangibly increase the capacities of their hard drives. Seagate was first out of the gate with HAMR, but currently such HDDs are only available to select customers. By contrast, Western Digital (or rather its HGST division) bet on MAMR initially, but then chose to use energy-assisted PMR (ePMR) for commercial hard drives last year.

Recently, Western Digital implied that ePMR is a good enough technology to increase HDD capacities for years to come, before HAMR takes over, which left us wondering about the fate of MAMR. While we still have no idea regarding Western Digital's MAMR plans, it looks like Toshiba, Showa Denko, and TDK believe that MAMR and MAS-MAMR technologies have strong potential for capacity growth.

Toshiba this week announced the industry's first 18TB hard drives featuring flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology, that are designed for desktops and inexpensive NAS. The X300 and N300 drives not only offer a very high capacity and enhanced performance, but they also promise enhanced reliability.

Toshiba's X300 18TB HDDs for high-end desktops, as well as N300 18TB HDDs for NAS with up to eight drives, use the same platform as the company's MG09-series HDDs for enterprise and nearline applications. This is the company's third-generation 7200 RPM-class helium-sealed platform, sporting nine aluminum platters as well as a microwave-emitting component near the write heads that changes the magnetic coercivity of the media before recording data. The platters are made by Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) and feature a 2TB capacity, as well as approximately 1.5 Tb/inch2 areal density that was enabled by Toshiba's FC-MAMR technology.

Toshiba has not formally disclosed performance numbers for its 18TB HDDs for desktops and NAS, but since they have the same spindle speed and the same areal density as the MG09-series devices, expect them to offer similarly high — 281 MB/s — maximum sustained data transfer rate.

In a bid to better address desktops, Toshiba's X300 18TB hard drives feature a new stabilization mechanism to guarantee 'improved operational reliability (though Toshiba is not talking about RV sensors or top-and-bottom attached spindle here) as well as a new caching technology with optimized allocation to increase performance. Keep in mind that high-capacity HDDs have a rather low random read/write performance per TB (IOPS-per-TB) and have to perform background operations. Optimizing caching and prioritizing workloads is a way to make such drives more responsive. For some reason though, these drives are only covered with a two-year warranty.

The interesting part about Toshiba's X300 18TB HDDs is that they are the world's only hard drives for desktops that use energy-assisted magnetic recording technology. Seagate currently does not use energy-assisted recording on any of its 18TB drives, whereas Western Digital formally does not position its WD Gold 18TB and Ultrastar 18TB products (which use ePMR) for desktops. Obviously, many workstations still use enterprise-grade 18TB HDDs for bulk storage, yet these drives are not optimized for desktop workloads, and are pretty loud.

As noted above, Toshiba's N300 18TB HDDs are designed for NAS with up to eight hard drives. To ensure consistent performance in vibrating environments, these HDDs are equipped with integrated RV sensors to compensate for the effects of rotational vibrations, as well as appropriate firmware. The HDDs are rated for an up to 180TB/year workload and are backed with a three-year warranty. 

Toshiba did not announce MSRPs for its 18TB X300 or N300 drives, but said that they would be available sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

Toshiba today announced a breakthrough on the road towards the quantum internet. In partnership with the Tohoku University Hospital (Japan), the team of researchers demonstrated the transmission of the entire human genome over 600 km of fiber optics - while encoding the information with quantum cryptography for the ultimate data privacy protection. The result of the research was published on the Nature Photonics scientific journal.

The data was moved and stored through several locations, spanning a total travel distance of around 600 km via fiber optics cables. A new, world-first dual band stabilisation technique was employed (the company has named it Twin Field), which helps in cancelling the problem of temperature and strain fluctuations usually present in quantum communications. This is pure physics: as data flows through optical cables, the cables themselves show diminutive contractions and expansions, which if not accounted for, can destabilize the extremely sensitive qubits used to encode and transmit the information - introducing errors in the data or even rendering it unusable. Toshiba's deployed dual band technique, as described by the company, "(...) sends two optical reference signals, at different wavelengths, for minimising the phase fluctuations on long fibres. The first wavelength is used to cancel the rapidly varying fluctuations, while the second wavelength, at the same wavelength as the optical qubits, is used for fine adjustment of the phase." The data was repeatedly verified at various stages of its journey through the network - and due to the new technique, showed no signs of degradation.

The research finally opens the door to long distance Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). QKD is essentially a distribution protocol for encryption keys, albeit based on quantum physics - and is being hailed as the final frontier in encryption schemas. This "final frontier of security" is being touted on the basis of quantum physics, and the behavior of qubits, themselves: after data has been encrypted with a secure QKD key, it can then be sent over an insecure connection (such as the internet), where only the holders of the decryption key can access its contents. Certain characteristics of the quantum realm are especially useful in guaranteeing security: for one, the basic quantum observation principle, which underpins much of quantum-bound research, states that the mere act of observing a flowing system will change its final result. Based on this, should the secure, QKD-encrypted communication be intercepted by a third party, the interception itself will induce changes into the flow of information, which can serve as a warning for the information sender (or receiver) that someone has attempted to tamper with and intercept the flow of data.

Andrew Shields, Head of the Quantum Technology Division at Toshiba Europe remarks, “QKD has been used to secure metropolitan area networks in recent years. This latest advance extends the maximum span of a quantum link, so that it is possible to connect cities across countries and continents, without using trusted intermediate nodes. Implemented along with Satellite QKD, it will allow us to build a global network for quantum secured communications.”

Another piece of investigation conducted by Toshiba includes multiplexing compatibility: this essentially allows both the data and the quantum keys to be transmitted on the same fibre, thus eliminating the need for a costly, dedicated infrastructure for key distribution.

Western Digital is progressing with its talks to merge with Kioxia, its long-time production partner, a new media report claims. The deal could be valued at more than $20 billion and, if cleared by antitrust regulators, would create the world's largest maker of 3D NAND with formidable manufacturing capacities and product design capabilities. 

The talks between Western Digital and Kioxia have intensified in the recent weeks and the final agreement could be reached already in mid-September, reports The Wall Street Journal. The U.S.-based maker of hard drives and some of the best SSDs reportedly intends to fund the deal with stock, which will make the consortium of investors that owns Kioxia a major shareholder of the new company. 

Kioxia and Western Digital jointly operate 3D NAND production facilities located at two sites in Japan. The two companies produced 33.4% of the global NAND memory output in Q1 2021 and were only 0.1% behind Samsung, according to TrendForce. If Kioxia and Western Digital merge, the combined company will be significantly larger than Micron and SK Hynix (even once the latter absorbs Intel's 3D NAND and storage business). 

In fact, the merged company will be the world's largest supplier of storage devices with plenty of clients, a large portfolio of IP and patents, leading-edge 3D NAND production capacities, hard drive manufacturing, several SSD design teams, and even a group of engineers working on RISC-V CPU cores for advanced storage devices.  

But building a company that will control over one third of NAND flash supply and a significant chunk of the HDD market will inevitably face scrutiny from antimonopoly regulators. Japanese authorities are usually unhappy when local companies are bought by foreigners, which is one of the reasons why Western Digital did not buy Toshiba's stake in joint manufacturing operations several years ago when Toshiba had to sell off its NAND business. Regulators from China, the U.S. and U.K. will also review the deal very thoroughly as building the world's largest storage device maker will inevitably reorder the market and will affect competitive landscape. 

Western Digital's intraday market capitalization after market close on Wednesday was $20.07 billion. The company has $3.37 billion in cash and yet has to pay debt of around $8.73 billion. Western Digital's stock jumped on Kioxia merger report, according to Barron's. 

Back in April we already reported that both Micron and Western Digital explored ways to gain control over Kioxia in a bid to tangibly increase their 3D NAND memory production capacities. By now, Micron has lost interest in acquiring Kioxia, according to the Wall Street Journal, which made Western Digital the only maker of 3D NAND interested in Kioxia. 

Neither Kioxia nor Western Digital commented on the news story. Since the deal is not official, it may fall apart. 

For the first time in recent years unit shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) demonstrated a positive dynamic in Q2 2022. In terms of exabytes, three makers of HDDs — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — shipped an all-time record of 350.7 exabytes due to demand from operators, exascale datacenters and Chia miners. While Seagate remained the No.1 producer of HDDs both in terms of units and in terms of exabytes shipped, Western Digital almost caught up with its arch-rival in the second quarter. 

67.6 Million HDDs sold in Q2 2021

Hard disk drive shipments in the second quarter of 2021 totaled 67.6 million units, according to Trendfocus (via Storage Newsletter) and data by companies. Nidec, the world's largest independent producer of motors for hard drives, estimates that the industry shipped 64 million units in Q2 2021, up from 63 million units in Q1 and flat with Q2 2020. The different between estimates is unexplainable at this point. Keep in mind that since the two out of three HDD suppliers do not publish their detailed unit shipments and only one publishes exabytes shipments, the numbers disclosed by analysts are generally educated guesses. This is why we use data from companies where possible.  

Seagate maintained its position on the No.1 spot with 28.17 million drives and 152.3 exabytes shipped in Q2 2021. Yet, Seagate's sales were only 2.3% up from the previous quarter. By contrast, Western Digital posted an impressive 9.2% increase in unit shipments (25.4 million) and almost caught up with it rival in terms of exabytes with 148.43EB suppled, based on Trendfocus data.  

In fact, Western Digital's achievements look even more impressive in terms of an average HDD capacity. In Q2, it was at 6.13TB per drive (vs. Seagate's 5.67TB), up from 4.72TB in Q1. This is an indicator that Western Digital has significantly increased shipments of its nearline/enterprise-grade drives and gained market share. By contrast, Toshiba's hard drives featured a 3.75TB capacity on average.  

Exabytes shipments totaled a record 350.7EB, based on data from Trendfocus and companies.

High-Capacity HDD Sales Hit Record

It is not a secret that many client devices have already moved on to solid-state storage, so sales of all client HDDs have dropped. Therefore, there was nothing surprising in a 4.51% decline of PC HDDs sales in the second quarter of 2021. What was surprising was an almost 20% uptick in sales of 3.5-inch drives for consumer electronics. While we could attribute this to the growing popularity of Chia farming (and cheap SMR drives for that reason), an average capacity of such HDDs is around 3.88TB makes us a little pessimistic about such an attribution.  

A notable value are the number of sold 3.5-inch HDDs for nearline and enterprise applications. At 19.31 million, this is a record shipment, up almost 20% quarter over quarter. What is even more impressive is that capacity of nearline HDDs is now at almost 70% of exabytes shipments. 

Another noteworthy thing is that it looks like big customers had finished qualification of Western Digital's energy-assisted HDDs and the company started their high-volume shipments. This explains the jump of Western Digital's sales both in terms of units and (mostly, given the context) exabytes.

Summary

Unit shipments of hard drives are growing, a good thing for HDD makers. Executives from Seagate and Western Digital are not making predictions about further unit growth because Chia demand is unpredictable. Nidec, a maker of HDD motors is also pessimistic about HDD total available market. 

Exascalers now consume over two thirds of HDD capacity produced at a whopping 243EB, according to Trendfocus. There is a small caveat with the numbers here. A part of these drives ends up in the channel, which is why we are able to buy Seagate's Exos and Western Digital's Ultrastar at Amazon, albeit at an inflated price.  

Consumer-grade PC-bound HDD sales are continuing to decline. This is not surprising as SSD makers are doing pretty much everything to costs (including transitioning existing products to 3D QLC NAND) and prices (not that HDD makers are not keeping up with drive-managed SMR). With prices on this level, consumers and PC makers prefer SSDs over HDDs due to performance and other factors.

It is not a secret that unit shipments of hard drives are on the rise this year due to demand from exascale datacenters, typical users, and Chia farmers. In Q2 2021, three HDD makers not only increased unit sales of their products, but also set an all-time record in terms of hard drive capacity they shipped.  

Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital sold 67.6 million HDD units in the second quarter, 19 million of them were nearline/enterprise-grade drives. That's up 8.8 million from 58.8 million Q2 2020 and up 3.4 million from 64.2 million in Q1 2021, according to data by TrendFocus cited by Wells Fargo (and published by Blocks & Files). While HDD unit shipments are higher than they were in the recent quarters in the last couple of years, they are massively lower compared to around 160 million ~ 180 million HDDs sold every quarter a decade ago, back in 2011.  

But while unit shipments of hard drives are massively down, their capacity is massively up compared to 2011. Total HDD capacity supplied in Q2 was around 351.4EB, up 45% year-on-year as well as 22% quarter-on-quarter. A decade ago, three manufacturers shipped less than 100EB of hard drive capacity per quarter.  

High capacity nearline and enterprise drives (with an average capacity of around 12.8TB) accounted for 243EB, so capacity of the remaining 48.6 million drives for client applications totaled 108.4EB (which means that their average capacity was 2.33TB). Meanwhile, a capacity of an average HDD totaled 5.45TB in Q2 2021. 

High-end HDDs for nearline and enterprise applications help to uplift Seagate's, Toshiba's, and Western Digital's revenue. Since demand for HDDs is dropping because of competition from SSDs, revenues of these three suppliers dropped from $8 billion ~ $9 billion per quarter 10 years ago to around $5 billion ~ $5.5 billion in 2020. Still, due to extraordinary demand for advanced drives, HDD sales of the three makers totaled $6.2 billion, an increase of 20% YoY.

The hard drive market is already under pressure due to the emergence of cryptocurrency mining using hard drives, leading to stratospheric pricing, but that could become even worse in the coming months. According to some market analysts, the reappearance of the pandemic in Southeast Asia in general and Thailand in particular, along with a shortage of components, threatens hard drive production in the second half of the year. If authorities tighten lockdowns, then the supply of HDDs in the second half may be significantly impacted. 

Seagate and Western Digital produce a significant portion of their hard drives in Thailand, where local authorities forced lockdowns in highly populated areas starting July 12 to avoid the spread of the virus. HDD assembly facilities and factories where components (such as printed circuit boards) are built by companies like Quanta Storage and New Kinpo Group are located far from populated areas, but there is still an impact on production, reports DigiTimes.    

If the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic gets worse and Thailand and authorities decide to temporarily shut down manufacturing facilities, HDD production would either slow down or stop completely. 

Neither Seagate nor Western Digital have commented on the story.       

Demand for hard drives outstripped supply in May and June due to the Chia Coin farming craze, which caused a massive increase in HDD prices in retail. Both Seagate and Western Digital maximized their hard drive output in the second quarter to ease the shortages, but did not commit to investing any money in expanding their production capacities. Meanwhile, the actual increase of HDD shipments in Q2 2021 was a rather modest 2.75 million – 4.45 million units, according to preliminary data from Trendfocus (via Storage Newsletter).  

In total, 65.75 million ~ 67.45 million hard drives were shipped in the second quarter, up from approximately 63 million a quarter before. Western Digital could increase its shipments by up to 7.8% quarter-over-quarter, Toshiba could boost its supply by up to 7.8% QoQ, whereas Seagate could increase its unit shipments by up to 2.8% QoQ, preliminary Trendfocus data shows. 

Based on information from Trendfocus, it does not look like HDD makers have a lot of spare capacity left, especially considering the high demand for hard drives both from hyperscale datacenters and PC makers/regular users. To that end, any disruption to production would only exacerbate ongoing drive supply issues. 

The Chia Coin cryptocurrency craze led to an almost immediate shortage of many popular hard drives, and the resulting price hikes were intense. Now Chia appears to be slowing down, which should result in reduced demand for high-capacity HDDs and high-endurance SSDs. We examined how the slowed Chia expansion and improved HDD supply have affected retail HDD pricing, but while some pricing has come down over the last month, it turns out that most drives are still selling far over their MSRP. In some cases, pricing has even increased. 

The Chia-driven storage crisis unfolded at breakneck speed. In just about a month, from late April to early June, the space allocated to the Chia network increased from 1 exabyte to 16 exabytes. Since the largest HDD makers sell only 30% to 40% of their products via distributors and retailers, the steep increase in demand immediately caused a shortage, and pricing skyrocketed.

According to our previous observations, by mid-May, high-capacity HDDs were almost impossible to find even though pricing increased anywhere from $100 to $350 per drive. 

But as you can see in the graphs above that measure the total amount of storage capacity dedicated to the Chia network, now the growth has slowed. It increased from 16.1 exabytes on June 1 to 29.098EB on June 29, which is still significant growth, but the pace of Chia's expansion is clearly decelerating. Let's see how that has impacted HDD pricing. 

Desktop HDDs: 10TB, 12TB & 14TB, 7200 RPM, CMR

Premium desktop drives are not very suitable for Chia farming since they are not designed to work in multi-drive environments. However, their typically lower pricing does lend itself well to miners looking to pull the maximum profit, leading to shortages. 

10TB

To our great surprise, but pricing for some 10TB desktop HDDs, like Seagate's BarraCuda Pro 10TB and Western Digital's WD_Black 10TB, have actually increased since mid-May, probably because supply diminshed. In contrast, Toshiba's X300 10TB remained at its mid-May pricing.

12TB

The Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB seems to have stayed at its price of around $430 (if you can buy it from Amazon). In contrast, Toshiba's X300 12TB HDD is $336 – $398, down from $498 – $506 in mid-May, but up from its price in April.

Western Digital does not produce 12TB desktop HDDs, so we're looking at its enterprise-oriented WD Gold 12TB for this category. This drive was at $340 – $440 at Amazon in May, but now it is at $400 – $580, an apparent hike. Unfortunately, Western Digital did not offer this drive in its own online store at press time, suggesting supply issues.

Overall, the 12TB desktop drives are a mixed bag: Seagate's BarraCuda Pro maintained its price, Toshiba's X300 got cheaper, but Western Digital's WD Gold is actually more expensive than it was in May.

14TB

14TB desktop HDDs are hard to find. Western Digital simply does not offer desktop drives of such capacity, which is why we have to consider the WD Gold 14TB in this category. Since Seagate's Barracuda Pro 14TB could not be found at the time of writing, we also had to consider Seagate's Exos X16 14TB drive. Both drives are cheaper than they were in May but are still significantly more expensive than they were in March or April.

Toshiba's X300 14TB is the only 14TB drive that is actually designed for desktops, and not for cloud datacenters. This part has never been exactly affordable at up to $550. Back in May, it was $599 at Amazon's resellers. It sits at $598 as we speak, with no price changes. 

NAS: 12TB & 14TB

12TB

Proper NAS drives (7200 RPM, CMR) are way better prepared for Chia mining than desktop HDDs given the fact that they are designed to work in a multi-drive environment. 

With 12TB NAS HDDs, we again see a mixed bag. Seagate's IronWolf 12TB and Toshiba's N300 12TB are actually more expensive than they were in May. By contrast, Western Digital's WD Red Plus 12TB (we are talking about a CMR 5400-RPM drive here) is actually less expensive than it was.

14TB 

Going up to 14TB reveals that Seagate's IronWolf 14TB can be had for $470 from one of Seagate's partners, which is down from $620 in mid-May, but still a bit higher compared to the pre-Chia frenzy price. Something similar happened to Toshiba's Enterprise Capacity 14TB: it is less expensive than it was in May, but more expensive than it used to be previously.

By contrast, the price of Western Digital's Red Plus 14TB is one of the drives that didn't get any more expensive during the Chia frenzy. Its price has remained at around $460 level for quite some time. 

Datacenter/Enterprise HDDs: 16TB & 18TB, 7200 RPM, CMR

Enterprise-oriented HDDs are designed for heavy-duty work. They are very fast (compared to other HDDs) and designed to be very reliable, but they aren't designed to be quiet. These drives are suitable for Chia mining given their capacities, CMR, and ability to work in multi-drive environments.

16TB

Just like other high-capacity drives, Toshiba's Enterprise Capacity 16TB became significantly more expensive in May due to high demand. Its price has now dropped to $410 (provided that you can get it), which is a tad higher than it was before. We can basically say that the price of this HDD is back to its normal level.

The situation is quite different with Seagate's Exos X16 16TBand Western Digital's WD Gold 16TB. The price of both SKUs skyrocketed in May, and while they are down significantly now, they are still considerably more expensive than they were earlier this year.

18TB

18TB hard drives are range-topping models that are not meant to be cheap. Due to the high demand for advanced HDDs, these drives are selling at prices significantly higher than their MSRPs.

If you are lucky, you can get Seagate's Exos X18 18TB for around $600, or Western Digital's WD Gold 18TB for approximately $700 today. In both cases, the HDDs are significantly cheaper than they were several weeks ago ($1000). In fact, there are still dealers offering 18TB HDDs for $1400. Normally, these drives were around $500 earlier this year.

Summary

While the prices of enterprise-level HDDs have plunged significantly (probably as a result of the Chia craze easing and retail demand receding), they are still not where they were just three months ago. These drives are not designed to be cheap, but at present, they are downright expensive as they are selling for around $200 more than before. The bigger problem is that not all SKUs are readily available. 

By contrast, prices of consumer-oriented drives are actually going up because of high demand, or they're staying at levels that most of us would find to be too expensive. Furthermore, there are some high-end SKUs (e.g., Seagate's Barracuda Pro 14TB) that are simply not available, an indicator that companies are prioritizing the production of enterprise-grade HDDs over regular desktop drives.

Demand for hard drives skyrocketed recently because of Chia cryptocurrency farming, causing major HDD shortages and sending retail prices to record highs. In a bid to meet the demand for hard drives, Seagate and Western Digital are ramping up production of their high-capacity HDDs by cranking up their existing production lines to utilize them more fully, a process that takes time. However, neither company has immediate plans to increase their production capacity (i.e., build new factories/production lines) in the near term, meaning shortages could persist if the Chia craze continues.

HDD makers sell the vast majority of drives to large customers under long-term agreements per predefined terms and conditions, so they're contractually obliged to send trucks of drives to their biggest customers. That makes quickly ramping up production for retail outlets anywhere from hard to impossible. In fact, Seagate sells only 30% of its HDD output via distributors and retailers, whereas Western Digital supplies 40% of its hard drives using distribution channels.

As a result, when the Chia coin frenzy started this April, neither vendor could suddenly pump more drives into retail as prices of higher-capacity hard drives skyrocketed and range-topping models quickly sold out.

At press time, the hard drive capacity allocated to the Chia network totaled a whopping 20EB (exabytes), up from 13EB on May 29 and up from 1EB in late April. 20EB is still less than 10% of the total HDD capacity (288EB) shipped in Q1 2021, though.

The consumer world has mostly moved to SSDs, so Seagate and Western Digital reduced their HDD production capacities over the last several years as hard drive sales decreased. In fact, even the existing production capacity is more than sufficient to satisfy demand — at least normally.

To meet the demand for hard drives for Chia farmers, both HDD makers will ramp up the production of HDD components and drives (for example, going from a 90% utilization of existing production lines to 100%). According to executives from two companies that spoke at investor conferences this week, that's exactly what they're doing.  

"This new [Chia cryptocurrency] demand is basically helping us to improve […] in the short-term, and bridge from a situation of underutilized capacity to a situation of almost fully utilized capacity," said Gianluca Romano, the chief financial officer of Seagate, at Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2021 Global Technology Conference (via SeekingAlpha). "Then, in two or three quarters we see where we are, and if it is still a great opportunity, we can upsize and increase the volume or staying as we were planning before, still in a very good situation." 

"[Chia is] clearly an incremental opportunity, we are viewing it as such, we do not really know what the longevity is going to be whether it is a little bit of a short-term spike, or whether it is something we are going to be able to count on for many years to come," said Bob Eulau, the chief financial officer of Western Digital, at Stifel 2021 Virtual Cross Sector Insight Conference. "[..]And we'll see how the Chia situation plays out incrementally, it's mostly affected volumes in the channel. And we went through a period where we got pretty lean in terms of channel inventory, and we're working to get that situation resolved and basically producing for all of our customers at full capacity right now." 

“We are going to be very cautious in terms of adding capacity on the hard drive side. We really think that margins in that business need to improve before we make incremental investments,” he added. 

For now, both Seagate and Western Digital are not sure whether Chia will become a long-term HDD growth opportunity, or if Chia network growth will stop as it stabilizes at a certain capacity. If this happens, the two companies will have more visibility into demand and adjust production capacities accordingly. 

In the meantime, neither company plans to increase overall production capacity, like building a new factory or production lines, to meet demand from Chia farming. Rather, they will use everything they have to produce as many high-capacity drives as possible. That means the retail pricing for advanced drives will depend on demand from Chia farmers more than it depends on supply from Seagate and Western Digital, at least in the near term. 

Financial analysts believe that while hard disk drive pricing has spiked in recent weeks due to Chia coin mining and will continue to be higher than usual for a while, average HDD prices will not get considerably higher than they are today as there is extraordinary demand for specific models rather than for all kinds of drives. But there's a catch. 

Demand for nearline hard drives for data centers has consistently grown for years. In contrast, demand for high-capacity HDDs for consumers has increased in recent weeks because of Chia coin cryptocurrency mining. As a result, prices of higher-capacity hard drives increased in recent weeks, whereas range-topping models have sold out.  

The market is experiencing a tight supply of HDDs, which is comparable to the situation in 2012 when flooding in Thailand stopped the production of hard drives in the country. Back then, average prices of HDDs increased by roughly 22%, according to Sidney Ho, an analyst with Deutsche Bank. This time, price hikes will not be that high. 

"While the use of storage for Chia is relatively small compared to the total industry output, demand for large consumer hard drives has increased significantly due to Chia mania, with drives sold out on many websites and pricing on secondary markets meaningfully higher than usual," Ho wrote in a note to clients, reports Barron's. 

Our HDD price analysis from earlier this week demonstrated that prices of midrange HDDs featuring a 6TB or 8TB capacity did not change significantly in recent weeks. 10TB hard drives also did not get substantially more expensive. Meanwhile, 12TB, 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB HDDs got dramatically more expensive in just a few weeks (some SKUs gained $100, others doubled).

The vast majority of 14TB – 18TB HDDs are nearline drives, such as Seagate's Exos and Western Digital's WD Gold and Ultrastar. Most of those drives are sold directly to companies like Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft at pre-arranged prices and therefore never reach retail.   

Joseph Moore, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, says that Seagate sells about 30% of its HDDs via distributors and retailers, whereas Western Digital ships 40% of its products using these channels. As a result, the vast majority of hard drives from Seagate and Western Digital are not sold through retail and therefore cannot get meaningfully more expensive because of the ongoing Chia mania. Still, the manufacturers can naturally increase their prices because of higher demand and the necessity to procure more components. 

In general, while high-capacity HDD retail pricing could increase by well over 22%, average HDD prices will not increase tangibly as most HDDs are sold at pre-arranged prices. In contrast, midrange models are not getting more expensive due to modest demand. 

"Our view right now is that Seagate and Western Digital will benefit from the incremental volume, pricing and thus gross margin tailwinds in the short-term, but that cloud demand […] remains the primary driver of results," Ho wrote. "Longer-term, there just remains too much uncertainty […] on the future general acceptance of Chia or most cryptocurrencies to fundamentally adjust our outlooks for the industry. Whatever Chia becomes, though, it is a positive for the industry to see additional potential consumer growth opportunities."

HDD pricing, particularly for high-capacity models, in the US is rising steeply as enthusiasm for Chia cryptocurrency farming grows. We've seen these same trends already with GPUs: The tight supply of graphics cards amid booming demand for PCs coupled with the ongoing Ethereum cryptomining obsession increased GPU pricing by at least twice the original MSRPs. Now it looks like something similar is happening with HDDs.

The number of hard drives sold each year has declined recently due to the migration of consumer PCs to SSDs, and also demand for higher-capacity HDDs by exascale datacenters. As a result, HDD makers no longer produce as many drives as they used to six or seven years ago (they have even adjusted production capacities to cut costs). Also, wholesalers and retailers no longer carry as many HDDs in reserve. Consequently, when demand for HDDs spikes, retailers sell out quickly, and prices increase as dealers come into play.  

This is apparently what happened to the prices of HDDs in recent weeks as many popular models got $100, $200, or even $300 more expensive than they were just a few days ago. There are various reasons why the demand for hard drives is increasing. Still, considering how fast space allocated to the Chia network is growing (from 1 exabyte to 6 exabytes in about two weeks), we have every reason to believe that Chia cryptocurrency farming is a major factor that affects HDD availability and pricing in the channel and retail. Chia 'farmers' use all types of drives (mostly high-capacity models, though), so it is getting increasingly hard to buy a high-capacity HDD. 

To get a more complete picture, we decided to examine the dynamics of HDD prices at Amazon.com using the CamelCamelCamel.com database. To do so, we took a look at how the prices of HDDs for desktops, NAS, and datacenters changed in recent months. We omitted specialty HDDs like those for surveillance because while it is possible to use them in PCs or for Chia farming, they are not designed for these workloads. We also preferred to examine the prices of newer HDD models. It is noteworthy that most of the drives we examined were not available directly from Amazon and were sold by various dealers, which usually means somewhat inflated prices.

Desktop Drives

People who buy an internal hard drive for a desktop computer tend to have diverse needs. Some need additional capacity to keep their photos and videos locally, so they don't really care about performance and are satisfied with inexpensive energy-efficient HDDs with a 5400 RPM spindle speed. Others not only need additional capacity but also demand a higher-performance drive to access their data faster. Therefore, we examined two categories of desktop HDDs.

Desktop HDDs: 6TB & 8TB, 5400 RPM, SMR

It is not easy to obtain an inexpensive 5400 RPM hard drive with predictable performance these days as most cheap HDDs use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, meaning they aren't particularly friendly to random writes and rewriting in general. Same moderate-capacity drives are sometimes used inside branded DAS devices, so investigate before you buy if you think that SMR is not for you. 

Since we are looking at higher capacity drives, we decided to examine cheap 6TB and 8TB models from Seagate and Western Digital. Toshiba does not seem to offer cheap DT02-series 5400 RPM/SMR HDDs in the USA at this point. 

Seagate's BarraCuda 6TB (ST6000DM003) has sold for around $140 for months and its price has not changed since the beginning of the Chia frenzy.  

The price of Western Digital's WD Blue 6TB (WD60EZAZ) HDD has fluctuated significantly throughout its lifespan. In March it was available for about $115, but today it can be purchased for $130, which is not exactly a noticeable price hike given how unstable its price has been. 

Seagate's BarraCuda 8TB (ST8000DM004) used to cost $140 in early January. Now it is available for $190. 

Desktop HDDs: 10TB, 12TB & 14TB, 7200 RPM, CMR

Unlike cheap 5400 RPM desktop HDDs, 7200 RPM drives are based on conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technologies that do not use shingling (e.g., PMR, TDMR, etc.). Hence, these drives offer relatively high and, perhaps more importantly, predictable performance. 

Both Seagate and Toshiba offer a wide range of 7200 RPM-class HDDs that use CMR (conventional magnetic recording) technology and offer capacities up to 14TB. By contrast, Western Digital's WD_Black tops at 10TB, so we used WD Gold models for higher capacities. 

10TB

Seagate's BarraCuda Pro 10TB (ST10000DM001) was sold for around $350 several weeks ago. At the moment, it is priced at $380 when bought directly from Amazon and at $400 when acquired from its partners, an evident, yet not very significant price increase. 

Western Digital's WD_Black 10TB (WD101FZBX) carries an MSRP of $330, but it was not available directly from the company at press time. Surprisingly, but it could be readily bought for $330 at Amazon (as of press time).  

The price of Toshiba's X300 10TB (HDWR11AXZSTA) has been fluctuating from $260 to $290 for months, but increased to $320 – $330 at times. The drive currently costs $290 – $295, depending on the retailer, but the price may well rise or drop.

12TB 

12TB and 14TB desktop HDDs are naturally more future-proof from a capacity point of view and are also a better fit for Chia cryptocurrency farming, so their prices actually changed more significantly than prices of lower-capacity models.

There is one exception, though. The Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB (ST12000DM007) hard drive has not changed much compared to previous months. Most of the time, the drive sold for around $480, but some lucky buyers could obtain it for $400 – $440. It is not in stock, but Amazon offers a pre-order for $485. 

Toshiba's X300 12TB HDD (HDWR21CXZSTA) was recently priced at around $320 with some brief spikes. In the last couple of weeks, its price increased to $498 – $506 depending on the seller. 

Western Digital's WD Gold 12TB (WD121KRYZ) used to cost around $340 in February and March, but now it is available directly from the company for $416. Meanwhile, it could be purchased for $440 at Amazon at press time.

14TB

The pricing of Seagate's BarraCuda Pro 14TB (ST14000DM001) has shifted from $480 to $550 for months, but in the last few days, its price at Amazon increased all the way to $583 – $649, a clear indicator that demand is exceeding supply. At least the HDD is in stock at some dealerships. 

Toshiba's X300 14TB drive (HDWR21EXZSTA) has never been particularly cheap, but it was possible to get it from $470 to $500 in recent months (even for about $400 if you were lucky). Now it starts at $599. 

Being aimed at enterprises, Western Digital's WD Gold 14TB (WD141KRYZ) is not supposed to be cheap, which is why it sold for about $450 from November '20 to March '21, when its price dropped to $410. The price of this drive has gone upwards since mid-March, so now it is $527 – $630 at Amazon, if you're lucky. Meanwhile, Western Digital had these drives in stock at press time for $499. 

NAS

Unlike desktop drives, NAS drives are designed for multi-drive environments, so they better handle vibration and other peculiarities of such setups. Just like with desktop HDDs, there are various types of NAS drives offering different performance levels and powered by either CMR (midrange and high-end SKUs) or SMR (entry-level drives only). Since the cheapest NAS drives use SMR, we prefer to focus on midrange and higher-end models that use CMR and have a spindle speed of 7200 RPM.

NAS: 8TB, 10TB, 12TB & 12TB+

Mainstream NAS HDDs are aimed at homes and small offices, they are designed for NAS with up to eight bays and are rated for up to a 180TB/year workload. Since very few people truly need to host loads of data at home, we checked relatively inexpensive 8TB, 10TB, and 12TB models that usually offer a combination of a reasonable price and decent capacity. 

8TB

The pricing of Seagate's IronWolf 8TB (ST8000VN0022, CMR, 7200 RPM) has been fluctuating widely for the past year. In the last couple of weeks, it increased from $250 to $290. Perhaps that's because Seagate's IronWolf 8TB is not a particularly new HDD and it is rare in general. 

Western Digital's Red Plus 8TB (WD80EFBX, CMR, 7200 RPM) HDD has actually gotten cheaper this March and is now available at Amazon and Western Digital's online store for $198. There are some resellers trying to sell it for $238, though.

10TB

Amazon sold Seagate's IronWolf 10TB (ST10000VN0008, CMR, 7200 RPM) for about $280 from April '20 to April '21. Demand for this drive picked up this April and has increased to at least $375. 

Western Digital currently sells two versions of its WD Red Plus 10TB HDDs (WD101EFAX, WD101EFBX, CMR, 7200 RPM) with similar performance levels. Pricing of both has been generally unstable but remained in the ballpark of $280. Today, a WD Red Plus 10TB can still be purchased for $280 directly from the manufacturer, whereas the model WD101EFBX can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $280. In contrast, the WD101EFAX is available at Amazon for $360 – $380.

12TB

Seagate's IronWolf 12TB (ST12000VN0008, CMR, 7200 RPM) was selling for around $310 until late April, when its price bounced. At this point, it can be purchased for $457. 

Western Digital's WD Red Plus 12TB (again, we have two SKUs here, WD120EFAX and WD120EFBX, both are CMR, 7200 RPM) has an MSRP of $310, yet it is currently not available directly from the manufacturer at this price. It is also listed on Amazon with a $479 price tag. A note: the graph is not missing, it was simply not available at CamelCamelCamel. 

Toshiba's N300 12TB (HDWG21CXZSTA, CMR, 7200 RPM) could be had for $255 in December 2020, but with the recent price hikes as a result of overwhelming demand, the HDD is now priced at $397 – $409.

12TB+

Higher-end NAS drives are designed for business applications with up to 24 bays and are rated for up to 300TB/year workload. Advanced HDDs for NAS usually overlap with cheaper NAS drives in terms of capacity and performance, but are priced noticeably higher. They also overlap with slightly more expensive data center/enterprise drives in terms of capacity and features. As a result, the niche of Seagate's IronWolf Pro and Western Digital's WD Red Pro is pretty narrow. Furthermore, since these HDDs are aimed at businesses, most of such drives are sold in already populated NAS devices. As a result, it is not easy to track the prices of separate drives. 

Seagate's IronWolf Pro 16TB (ST16000NE000) is one of the 'dream' NAS HDDs as it has all the reliability, endurance, and performance perks that the company can offer. It also comes with +Rescue data recovery plan. It has never been cheap, but you could buy it for about $500 throughout 2020 and early 2021. This May its price catapulted to over $1,000. Right now, one dealer offers it for $1,087. If you want something cheaper, an Amazon partner offers an IronWolf Pro 14TB (ST14000NE0008) for $848. 

Toshiba's MG-series Enterprise Capacity HDDs are designed for data centers that run 24/7 and are priced accordingly. But at some point, pricing for such a drive quickly drops, making them viable candidates for all kinds of NAS applications and even for desktops/workstations. This is what happened with Toshiba's Enterprise Capacity 14TB (MG07ACA14TE) HDD that plunged to about $275 earlier this year. Unfortunately, rapidly escalating demand drove its price to $539, and at press time, one of the dealers offered it for $589.

Datacenter/Enterprise HDDs: 16TB & 18TB, 7200 RPM, CMR

Datacenter and enterprise hard drives are not exactly meant for client PCs, but they are often used for workstations because of higher workload ratings and because manufacturers actually test every drive before shipping, which adds peace of mind. Furthermore, they offer capacities not available with other lineups, a valuable advantage for a workstation. However, in recent weeks many consumers had to start looking at products like Seagate's Exos and Western Digital's WD Gold not because they are good, but because high-capacity HDDs for NAS and desktops were sold out.

16TB

Seagate formally has two base 16TB Exos drive SKUs: the latest-generation Exos X18 16TB (ST16000NM000J) and the previous-generation Exos X16 16TB (ST16000NM001G). The newer one is slightly faster, but it yet has to make it to the retail market, which is why we examined the X16. 

Up until mid-April, the pricing of Seagate's Exos X16 16TB has been on the decline and at times it was possible to get it for $330. Today, the drive is not available from Amazon, whereas resellers offer it for $660 and higher. 

Toshiba's Enterprise Capacity 16TB HDD (MG08ACA16TE) has never been sold by Amazon itself, but various dealers sold it for $350 – $380 till mid-April. In just a month's time, the price of this drive increased to $643. But at this point, the HDD is not available from any of Amazon's partners. 

The retail price of Western Digital's WD Gold 16TB (WD161KRYZ) was surprisingly stable throughout its life cycle. For months the drive was available for $520, then dropped to $450 this February. Unfortunately for buyers, its price rose to $650 – $700 in April, and then the product went MIA (at least as of press time). The good news is that Western Digital offers this drive for $600 on its website.  

Western Digital also has a crème-de-la-crème lineup — the Ultrastar DC — for datacenters and exascalers. These drives are pretty rare in retail, which is why their price tends to be inflated. Nonetheless, earlier this year it was possible to get Western Digital's Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB (WUH721816ALE6L4) for around $380 at Amazon. Yet, because of the high demand for these drives, the price of this product skyrocketed to $770 before the stock was sold out.

18TB

18TB hard drives are the range-topping models these days as 20TB SKUs are only available to select customers. To that end, 18TB models are not even supposed to be reasonably priced. 

Seagate's Exos X18 18TB (ST18000NM000J) retailed well below $500 for months, a very unusual situation for a top-of-the-line model. Yet, starting from April its price started to surge and at some point even hit the psychological $999.99. At press time, it was available from one dealer for $730. 

Western Digital's WD Gold 18TB (WD181KRYZ) was sold at $600 from September to late February when it dropped to $510. In mid-April, its price began its upturn and elevated to $946 in May. Meanwhile, even at such a high price, all units were sold out and the drive is not available either from Amazon or from Western Digital's online store.

Summary 

All hard disk drives got more expensive in the last few weeks in retail because of generally high demand and the Chia cryptocurrency frenzy. Yet, prices of some HDDs increased just slightly, whereas prices of others truly skyrocketed.  

Inexpensive models featuring a 5400 RPM spindle speed and SMR got marginally more expensive, possibly because people are not buying them too enthusiastically due to performance concerns. HDDs with capacities of 8TB and below did not get significantly more expensive in general, so those who are buying a new desktop computer and do not need loads of storage can get them without breaking the bank. 

In contrast, high-performance high-capacity models got significantly more expensive. Select 10TB and higher-capacity models gained around $100, but in some cases prices got $250 ~ $350 higher. Meanwhile, range-topping16TB and 18TB models are either greatly overpriced or are sold out. 

Western Digital stands out from other makers of hard drives with its online store that has dozens of attractive HDD SKUs available at their MSRP or at least at an honest price. 

A senior U.S. senator on Tuesday filed a formal enquiry with three makers of hard drives — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — asking whether they complied with a regulation that requires them to obtain a license to sell HDDs to Huawei.

Republican senator Roger Wicker this week decided to find out whether Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital believed that the new rule "prohibits shipment of hard disk drives to Huawei or any affiliate without a license" and the status of all license applications to ship their products to Huawei. The senator told Reuters that he was "in a fact-finding process ... about whether leading global suppliers of hard disk drives are complying."

Last August the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed new rules that required any company that sells hardware, software, equipment, or any other asset designed and/or built using American IP to Huawei to obtain a special export license from the U.S. government. Such licenses are usually reviewed with a presumption of denial policy, so they tend to be especially hard to get.

Last September two U.S.-based makers of hard drives had different views on the new rules. Western Digital said that it ceased to supply HDDs and SSDs to Huawei and applied for a license, whereas Seagate initiated an investigation to find out whether it actually needed a license.

Toshiba is a Japan-based company, so it might be a little easier for the company to work with Huawei. Still, since Toshiba uses loads of technologies developed in the U.S. (e.g., it has IP related to 3.5-inch HDDs that it obtained from Western Digital), it has to get a license from the U.S. DoC anyway.

Huawei sells thousands of different products, many of which need an HDD or an SSD to function. While there are solid-state drives that use solely Chinese technologies, HDDs are made by three companies in the world using machinery and IP designed in the USA. While Huawei said it had stockpiled enough components to keep its businesses running for a while, in eight months almost any stock should have been depleted. Therefore, the senator wants to find out whether Huawei procures HDDs on open market, or continues to be supplied by manufacturers themselves.

Unit shipments of hard drives in the first quarter of 2021 were down both sequentially and year-over-year as consumer devices continued their migration to SSDs. Still, HDD capacity sold during the quarter set a new record of 288 exabytes as hyperscalers and enterprises upgraded their storage capabilities. Seagate remained the world's largest maker of hard drives in terms of units and exabytes (EB) shipped. 

Nearly 60% of New PCs Use SSDs

The industry shipped as many as 83.981 million PCs in Q1 2021, according to IDC. Meanwhile, only about 34.97 million hard drives for consumer PCs were sold last quarter (based on data from Trendfocus), so nearly 60% of personal computers shipped in Q1 used SSDs. This is not particularly surprising as many modern notebooks cannot house a hard drive. In contrast, enthusiast and workstation-grade desktops use SSDs because HDDs are rather slow for modern workloads by today's standards. 

The industry shipped 14.79 million hard drives for desktops (down 23% quarter-over-quarter) and 20.18 million drives for laptops (down 31.4% QoQ) in Q1, according to Trendfocus. The average capacity of an HDD for a client PC in the first quarter was 1.82TB (2.13TB for desktops, 1.58TB for notebooks), so most computers used rather inexpensive hard drives.

64 Million HDDs Sold in Q1

Hard disk drive shipments in the first quarter of 2021 totaled 64.17 million units, according to Trendfocus (via StorageNewsletter). Coughlin Associates (via Forbes) estimates that the hard drive TAM (total addressable market) in Q1 2021 was 64.1 million units, down from 67.8 million in Q1 2020. Meanwhile, Nidec believes that the industry sold 63 million units in the first quarter, up from 59 million units in the same quarter a year ago. 

Seagate retained its position as the world's leading maker of HDDs, with about 27.54 million HDDs sold in the first quarter and 42.9% of the market. Western Digital shipped 23.09 million drives and commanded 36% of the market. Toshiba was the distant No. 3 with 13.54 million HDDs supplied and 21.1% of the market. 

Seagate also led in average HDD capacity (5.07TB per drive) and exabytes shipments (139.5EB) in Q1 2021. In contrast, the average capacity of a Western Digital hard drive in Q1 was 4.72TB, and the company shipped 109.04EB of hard drive storage devices. 

Since the remaining three HDD makers don't disclose their detailed unit shipments, the numbers published by analysts are basically educated guesses. Meanwhile, the first quarter of 2021 did not bring many surprises as far as sales of hard disk drives are concerned, so the sales numbers and market shares should be quite accurate.

288 EB ~ 303 EB Shipped in Q1

The general trend for the hard drive market was set several years ago: HDD unit sales are declining while exabyte shipments are growing. Nothing changed in Q1 2021. Trendfocus believes that the total capacity of HDDs shipped by the industry was 288.28EB. By contrast, Coughlin Associates estimates that HDDs sold in Q1 2021 can store 303.34EB of data, up from 278.03 in Q1 2020. 

The lion's share of exabyte shipments belongs to 3.5-inch hard disk drives for servers, enterprise, nearline, and surveillance applications. About 16.05 million of such drives were sold in the first quarter, but with an average capacity of 12TB, they can store 192.78EB, thus commanding 66% of exabytes shipments in Q1 2021.

Console HDDs Are Dropping, DAS Remains Strong

Consumer electronics HDDs are a rather large category of storage devices for applications like game consoles, direct-attached storage (DAS), digital video recorders (DVRs), and similar things. Shipments of CE HDDs in Q1 2021 totaled 9.95 million units, according to both Trendfocus and Coughlin Associates. Meanwhile, the industry shipped 14.4 million CE hard drives in Q1 2020, based on data from CA. 

Since the latest game consoles from Microsoft and Sony no longer use HDDs, it is not surprising that shipments of hard drives for consumer electronics dropped significantly — by 31% — year-over-year.  

In fact, manufacturers shipped only 2.53 million 2.5-inch CE HDDs with an average capacity of 0.72 TB per unit in Q1 2021. The vast majority of 2.5-inch CE HDDs have been used for game consoles and branded external drives for years. So, as production of previous-generation gaming systems from Microsoft and Sony is winding down, shipments of 2.5-inchers will decline further. 

By contrast, sales of 3.5-inch CE HDDs remain strong. Trendfocus says about 7.42 million of these drives shipped during the quarter. An average capacity of a 3.5-inch CE hard drive was about 3.47TB, which indicates that most of them were used for various demanding applications, such as DAS. Branded DAS with high-capacity HDDs inside seems to be a pretty successful business for HDD makers as many people buy direct-attached storage for their PCs that come with SSDs (which do not always feature enough capacity for things like media).

Enterprise HDDs Booming

Enterprise HDDs have been the one bright spot in recent years. The enterprise-grade HDD category includes various drives for a wide variety of applications, including servers (both cloud and on-premise), enterprise NAS, nearline, and surveillance. In total, 19.25 million such HDDs were shipped in Q1 2021, according to Trendfocus. 

Surprisingly, despite general trends, shipments of 2.5-inch enterprise-grade HDDs (which includes legacy 10,000/15,000 RPM drives) totaled 3.2 million units, up both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. The average capacity of these HDDs was 1.37TB, so some legacy datacenters probably upgraded their capacities or just replaced old drives during the quarter. 

Sales of 3.5-inch enterprise-grade HDDs exceeded 16 million units and increased sequentially and annually in the first quarter. Enterprise-class 3.5-inchers shipped by the industry in Q1 could store 192.78EB of data, and their average capacity now slightly exceeds 12TB.  

Meanwhile, sales of nearline HDDs for exascalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure are booming. Seagate says that hard drives with 16TB and higher capacities (i.e., 16TB, 18TB, and 20TB) contributed nearly 50% of its capacity shipments during the quarter (139.5EB), which equals nearly 70EB.

Summary

 The HDD market in Q1 2021 brought no surprises and was consistent with trends set in the last five years or so.  

Mainstream client PCs are on track to replace HDDs with SSDs, but at the same time, people are buying more DAS, NAS, and cloud storage. To that end, shipments of client HDDs are declining, whereas sales of hard drives for other applications are growing. 

Enterprise-grade 3.5-inch HDDs are thriving. Now that data is generated not only by users but by computers themselves (in various forms), demand for storage will only grow and 288EB ~ 303EB of HDD storage shipped in Q1 2021 will increase rather rapidly in the coming quarters. 

Another emerging driver for HDD demand is of course Chia Coin cryptocurrency. At press time (on May 8), storage space allocated to the Chia network was nearing 3 exabytes, increasing three times from about 1 exabyte at the end of April. From the general market point of view, that is slightly over 1% of exabytes shipped in Q1, but it is already hard to acquire a high-capacity HDD at retail. What is going to happen next and whether Chia is set to become a factor that will cause a global shortage of hard drives is something that remains to be seen, but signs are not good for general users.

Just when we thought that smart cities, smart factories, IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, and robots will be the main generators of data that will require storage space in the coming years, Chia Coin cryptocurrency just demonstrated that it will also be a formidable generator of data, at least for the time being. 

In a about a month's time storage space allocated to Chia network increased from 120PB all the way to 1143PB, or 1.14 Exabytes. 1.14EB equals 1,140,000TB, or 63,333 20TB hard drives. 

Chia is a proof of space-time cryptocurrency that uses storage space on farmers' systems to store a collection of cryptographic numbers called 'plots.' When the blockchain broadcasts a challenge for the next block, farmers' systems scan their plots to see if they have the hash that is closest to the challenge. This method eliminates the Proof of Work concept used by Bitcoin and Ethereum therefore lowering vast power requirements for mining, which developers of Chia call 'farming.'  

Meanwhile, the probability of winning a block is the percentage of the total space that a farmer has compared to the entire network, which essentially means that someone with more available space has more chances to win. So, while accelerators and GPUs are not needed for Chia farming, someone with more storage space to host more plots earns more.  

At present a minimum size plot requires around 101GB of storage space and 4GB of RAM, so when one wants to store 100 K32 plots, they need a system with slightly more than 10TB of space, which is not too expensive. Meanwhile, creation of each plot requires 4GB of DRAM, so creating 100 plots in parallel would require 400GB of system memory, which cost quite a sum, yet almost nobody does it.

One of the moderators of r/Chia at Reddit noted. "The RAM and storage space used to make the plots is reused to make new plots, so one only needs as much SSD space and RAM as needed to create the number of plots they want to create at one time, either singularly or in parallel," he said.

Thousands of Chia farmers now build machines with tens of HDDs that can store tens terabytes of data. While one of such drives does not consume a lot — about 6.5W when operating and about 5.6W when idling — tens of such HDDs can consume hundreds of Watts when they work and usually more when starting up. For example, a system with 32 Western Digital HC550 18TB HDDs (like the one pictured above) powered by a monster motherboard with 32 SATA ports can consume around 180W when idling, which does not count power consumption of memory and compute modules. 

For obvious reasons, there are no consumer PC chassis or NAS boxes with 32 3.5-inch bays. Meanwhile, rack-based chassis with backplanes for data centers are quite expensive. As a result, hardware used for Chia farming is either DIY or designed specifically for this purpose and nothing else. Essentially, in just about several months' time a new segment of hardware market for Chia farming has developed. 

One recommended way to save power and money is to use Raspberry Pi to farm Chia Coin after you've built the plots on a PC. 

It remains to be seen how Chia cryptocurrency mining will develop going forward. But at this rate the amount of storage space used by Chia network will be gargantuan a year from now.