Consumer Electronic Devices require digital storage, whether local or in the cloud. At the 2018 CES as well as companion events, Digital Experience and Showstoppers, I had the opportunity to talk with many suppliers of digital storage devices, as well as folks using digital storage to enable their applications. This blog looks at products from Toshiba, Western Digital and Seagate Technology. The following blog will look at the many other storage products and some applications at the 2018 CES.
The hard disk drive companies (represented in this blog) I spoke with said that they had introduced their last generation of high-performance HDDs, these are 10,000 and 15,000 RPM HDDs used for enterprise applications. They all plan to only provide flash storage for high-performance applications, likely using the high-performance NVMe interface. In the enterprise space, capacity HDDs providing inexpensive storage will be the dominant application for HDDs.
Toshiba makes several digital storage products, including flash memory as well as hard disk drives. They recently introduced a 14 TB conventional magnetic recording 3.5-inch HDD with 9 disks. This is the largest hard disk drive using conventional magnetic recording, rather than shingled magnetic recording. Toshiba was also showing their large line of 2.5-inch hard disk drives, including their 7mm thick drives. I was told that Toshiba's 1 TB 2.5-inch 7 mm thick PC drive use SMR and that the industry is moving to SMR in one and two disk 2.5-inch drives.
In addition to its HDDs, Toshiba was showing their SSDs, including their brand new RC100 NVMe M.2 SSD. This product uses Toshiba’s 64-layer 3-bit-per-cell (TLC) BiCS flash memory, including an in-house SSD controller. This small drive, shown below, can deliver up to 1.6 GB/s read and 1.2 GB/s write transfer speeds. These drives are available with 120-480 GB storage capacities. The RC100 is targeted to all mainstream computing (from gaming desktops and notebooks to mini-PCs. In addition to this new SSD, Toshiba was showing a large line of SATA, SAS and NVMe SSDs, including Ball Grid Array SSDs for embedded applications. They also showed external HDD and SSD products.
Seagate was showing their co-pilot external storage product, developed in collaboration with drone maker, DJI. This is a rugged product focusing on ingest of content from flash memory cards in the field directly into a large portable HDD product, without having to use a computer. The product has a display that lets the consumer know the status of their ingested data.
Seagate was also showing a product that is popular in the China market and co-developed with JingDong, their Joy Drive, that combines a battery-powered external hard drive with phone or tablet charging. Both products offer USB-C interfaces and either USB-A or mini-USB as well. Seagate also introduced new versions of their LaCie Rugged drives with hardware encryption and a fast external SSD product with up to 1 TB capacity and a native USB-C connector.
Seagate had their 3.5-inch HAMR drive on display as well as a model of the dual actuator drive that they announced in December. Seagate was also showing a 5U 84-drive enclosure and operating system providing up to 1 PB of capacity with 84 drive trays supporting 8, 10 and 12 TB SAS drives, or SSDs. At some of the media events, they were also partnered with Synology external storage products as well as fire and waterproof external storage maker, ioSafe.
Western Digital had several HDD and flash-based products on display at the CES. Their HDD-based MyCloud Home device (available in a single and duo size) now works with popular devices that support Amazon Alexa services to allow access to stored music collections via voice commands. The product also works with Google Chromecast to allow streaming home videos, TV shows and movies using Chromecast-enabled Smart TVs.
Western Digital had a number of flash storage technologies on display including the world’s smallest 1 TB USB device, a USB-C flash solution for portable storage, a 480 GB micro-SD card and its Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive with capacity up to 256 GB. The company also introduced two portable SSDs. One is the My Passport Wireless SSD that allows one-touch card copy for editing and sharing content in the field as well as direct access to the device within third-party mobile creative apps. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is targeted for saving and editing high-resolution photos and videos.
Consumer applications are on the forefront in generating digital content that needs to be stored and accessed. Toshiba, Western Digital and Seagate Technology have products that meet these consumer needs, whether at home or in the cloud. Their consumer products including new features such as new form factors, access via voice recognition and alliances with drone companies.