Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants

As a part of its cost-cutting efforts, Seagate has decided to shut down its HDD manufacturing plant in Suzhou, China. The factory is one of the company’s largest production assets and its closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output. Seagate intends to lay off ~2200 employees, but it is unclear what it intends to do with the facility, which it owns.

The factory in Suzhou, China, assemblies hard drives and performs their final testing before shipping. The plant does not produce HDD subassemblies and thus is not vertically integrated, but at 1.1 million square feet (102 thousand square meters), this is one of Seagate’s largest manufacturing assets and the largest drive assembly facility. The company got the factory from Maxtor, when it acquired it in 2006. According to a media report, the plant no longer makes products and the last employees will be laid off on January 18, 2017.

“As part of our continual optimization of operational efficiencies, Seagate has made the difficult decision to shut down its factory in Suzhou, China,” an alleged statement by Seagate reads. “We regret that our Suzhou employees will be affected by this action, which reflects our ongoing commitment to reduce Seagate’s global manufacturing footprint and better align the business with current and expected demand trends.”

Last year Seagate announced intentions to optimize its manufacturing capacities from around 55-60 million drives per quarter to approximately 35-40 million drives per quarter. In 2016, the company already fired about 8,000 employees from different locations, but that was only a part of the strategy. With the plan to shut down the plant in Suzhou, the company actually reduces its ability to produce the drives.

After Seagate shuts down its plant in Suzhou, China, it will have two vertically integrated HDD production facilities in Wuxi, China, and Korat, Thailand. Both factories product drive subassemblies and actual HDDs, hence, by using only these two plants the company optimizes logistics (as it no longer has to transport drive subassemblies to Suzhou) and cuts its per drive manufacturing costs. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what happens to Seagate’s factories that only produce drive subassemblies (sliders and HGAs).

It is important to note that while Seagate cuts down HDD assembly capacities, it does nothing to plants that produce heads, media and substrates. Over the past few years, unit shipments of HDDs have declined, but their average capacities increased (especially capacities of HDDs for datacenters) due to strong demand for high-capacity SKUs. Therefore Seagate may not need to produce a lot of drives, but it needs to pack about the same amount of heads and platters into fewer HDDs. Moreover, in the coming years, the company will need more heads because of new manufacturing technologies (TDMR, HAMR, etc.) and more media because it can now pack more platters into high-end helium-filled drives.

What remains to be seen is what Seagate plans to do with its manufacturing assets from the Suzhou facility. The fab is so large that it does not seem that all of its equipment could be relocated to other facilities. Moreover, the building itself is huge and it is unclear what will happen to it.

Related Reading:

• Seagate to Lay Off Over 8,000 to Lower Costs
• Seagate Revives Maxtor Brand for External Storage
• The Evolution of HDDs in the Near Future: Speaking with Seagate CTO, Mark Re

Sources: Seagate, BestChinaNews, Reuters, The Register.

Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity

Seagate has formally introduced a new family of hard drives in the 2.5” form-factor. It is designed for laptops as well as external storage solutions. The new BarraCuda HDDs are based on 1 TB shingled magnetic recording platters and Seagate’s multi-tier caching technology. They enhance the maximum capacity of the company’s 2.5” HDDs to 5 TB – making the BarraCuda ST5000LM000 the world’s highest-capacity 2.5” hard drive.

The new Seagate BarraCuda 2.5” drives resemble the company’s Mobile HDDs introduced earlier this year and use a similar set of technologies: motors with 5400 RPM spindle speed, platters based on shingled magnetic recording technology with over 1300 Gb/in² areal density, and multi-tier caching. The 3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs that come with a 15 mm z-height are designed for external storage solutions because virtually no laptop can accommodate drives of that thickness. Meanwhile, the 7 mm z-height drives (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are aimed at mainstream laptops and SFF desktops that need a lot of storage space.

All the new BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs feature 128 MB of DRAM cache as well as multi-tier caching (MTC) technology, which is designed to hide peculiarities of SMR. Hard drives featuring shingled recording write new magnetic tracks that overlap part of the previously written tracks. This may slow down the writing process since the architecture requires HDDs to rewrite adjacent tracks after any writing operation. To “conceal” such peculiarities, Seagate does a number of tricks. Firstly, it organizes SMR tracks into bands in a bid to limit the amount of overwriting. Secondly, the MTC technology uses several bands of PMR tracks on the platters, around 1 GB of NAND flash cache as well as DRAM cache. When workloads generate relatively small amount of writes, the HDD writes data to NAND and/or to the PMR tracks at a predictable data rate. Then, during light workloads or idle time, the HDD transfers written data from the caches to SMR tracks, as described by Mark Re (CTO of Seagate) earlier this year.

To a large extent, Seagate’s multi-tier cache determines the performance of the company’s BarraCuda 2.5″ and Mobile HDD drives. For example, when Seagate announced its Mobile HDD products earlier this year, the company declared maximum sustainable transfer rate of the HDD at 100 MB/s. However, the documentation was altered later in the summer to reflect a maximum transfer rate of 140 MB/s (possibly due to updated firmware, or a change in the performance measurement method). Now, the high-capacity BarraCuda 2.5” (3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB) drives are rated for 130 MB/s, while the mainstream BarraCuda 2.5” (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are rated for 140 MB/s. This is still below the 145 – 169 MB/s offered by PMR-based Laptop HDDs from the company.

Seagate’s new BarraCuda 2.5”/7 mm HDDs for laptops should hit notebooks in the coming weeks as the company is already shipping them to its customers. Seagate does not currently offer SED and FIPS options for its BarraCuda family (those who need encryption can still get Seagate’s Mobile HDDs based on SMR technology). The company plans to add these technologies to the BarraCuda arsenal in the future.

The BarraCuda 2.5”/15 mm drives for external storage solutions will be used inside Seagate’s own DAS devices such as the Backup Plus Portable Drive and the Expansion Portable Hard Drive products. The Seagate Backup Plus Plus Portable Drive 5 TB (STDR5000100) is due in early November and will cost around $150 – $160. This device will be the world’s highest-capacity portable DAS and will not immediately have direct rivals in this particular form-factor. At present, the maximum-capacity 2.5” HDD offered by Western Digital is 4 TB with a 12.5 mm z-height. It is used inside a number of My Passport drives.

All the BarraCuda 2.5” drives are backed by a two-year warranty.

Seagate Begins Volume Shipments of Helium-Filled HDDs, Reveals Their Final Specs

Seagate has started volume shipments of its first helium-filled hard drives. They were announced earlier this year. The new HDDs are available to all interested parties, which means that Seagate’s biggest customers have already evaluated and validated them. Volume shipments of the 8 TB and 10 TB helium-filled hard drives will help Seagate to improve its financial results and margins, since the new HDDs will be amongst the most expensive drives in the company’s lineup.

Brand New Platform

The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 helium-filled hard drive is based on the company’s brand-new hermetically-sealed platform featuring fourteen heads and seven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters with up to 1.43 TB capacity each. Seagate claims that the new HDD platform is based on a special wide-weld hermetically sealed drive enclosure with a design based on a multi-step forging process. Besides that, it uses a motor attached to both top and bottom covers, in order to better handle vibrations and maximize reliability. Sensors for humidity, temperature and helium pressure ensure that the helium-filled drive is always being monitored for reliable operation.

Seagate has incorporated PowerChoice and PowerBalance technologies in the new drives. PowerChoice helps datacenter operators to manage power consumption during idle time by either reducing spindle speed, or even stopping disks completely, after an admin-defined interval of idle time. Meanwhile, PowerBalance technology helps the administrators to balance the power consumption and IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance of hard drives prior to installation.

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ helium hard drive sports a 256 MB multi-segmented cache. The platters rotate at 7200 revolutions per minute (RPM). The host interface is SATA 3.2 (6 Gbps), and supports hot-plugging.

Seagate claims that its multi-segmented cache helps the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 (Helium) HDD to improve performance compared to its predecessors and rivals and enables burst transfer rates at up to 600 MB/s (for small chunks of data, of course). The company does not reveal many details about its new caching algorithms, but 256 MB of memory is still a rather huge buffer.

Lineup and Performance Numbers

Seagate will offer multiple versions of its Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ Helium HDDs, including models with 8 TB capacity, 4K and 512e sectors as well as self-encrypting (SED) options.

Seagate declares fairly high performance numbers for its Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ Helium HDDs: 243 or 254 MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate as well as 4.16 ms average latency, which is higher than the numbers listed by competing drives from HGST and Western Digital.

Usage of helium inside a hard drive helps to reduce the drag force acting on the spinning disk stack and lower the fluid flow forces affecting the disks and the heads. As a result, HDD makers can install up to seven platters into a standard drive and also use lower-power motors and mechanics. This reduces the power consumption of the HDDs. For example, power consumption of Seagate’s 10 TB hard drive is actually lower than power consumption of the company’s 8 TB drive for nearline applications (8.5 W per drive vs. 10.4 W per drive).

For cloud datacenters, power consumption of HDDs is as important as their capacity. Increasing the capacity of the top-of-the-range hard drives from 8 TB to 10 TB automatically boosts total capacity per rack by 25% (which means an increase from 1920 TB to 2400 TB per standard rack that holds 240 drives). Going helium additionally reduces the power consumption of such a rack by up to 456 W. An increase of storage capacity amid reduction of power consumption not only maximizes data storage capacities of a particular facility, but also shrinks its total cost of ownership (TCO), an important metric for companies with multiple large datacenters.

Broad Availability, But No SAS Models Yet

It should be noted that when Seagate introduced its Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ 10 TB HDD in January, the company announced models with Serial ATA 6 Gb/s and SAS 12 Gb/s interfaces, which were aimed at different environments. At present, Seagate only ships models with SATA interfaces, meaning that customers, who need SAS, may still be evaluating SAS drives, which will come to market later. By contrast, HGST offers different models of its 10 TB HDDs: with SATA and SAS interfaces.

While Seagate said that its 10 TB helium-filled HDDs are available from its distributors worldwide, it did not reveal their actual prices. Amazon currently sells the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5″ HDD 10TB (ST10000NM0016) for $695.98 (note that this is not an MSRP), which is far from affordable. Still, keep in mind that we talking about exclusive products based on a brand-new platform. Such HDDs make a lot of sense for datacenters, but, currently, not so much for desktops or NAS units.