Interview: Seagate hints at return of extinct hard drive form factor ~ lotfi

"What out this space", Joe Fagan, Senior Director Cloud Initiatives, EMEA at Seagate, told me when I queried him about an earlier statement of his regarding the drive for a new hard disk form factor in the hyperscale market.

The likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon were the driving force behind the widespread adoption of Open Stack and Open Compute across the enterprise server industry and there are hints that the same may be happening in the storage segment of that industry.

Blame the data capacity gap highlighted by Seagate's own VP for that; Mark Whitby told us that the world would be running out of storage within two years simply because hard drive manufacturers can't churn out hard drives fast enough while consumption is following a hockey-stick trend. And that's not even accounting for the looming explosion in data production thanks to the IoT.

Facebook, Google have changed the game

So what would that new form factor be? "Hyperscale customers are the one giving momentum for the search for a new form factor" said Fagan. And 5.25-inch may well be one of them. The abandoned format was popular back in the 90s before falling out of favour as 3.5-inch became more popular.

Other than optical disk drives (ODD), casings and some accessories, nobody uses 5.25-inch anymore. Why settle on 5.25-inch? He didn't provide an answer but going large in this case could allow for much bigger platter sizes and cramming a lot of those in a drive the size of a common ODD could fairly easily deliver a 20TB hard disk drive.

"It's all about the storage capacity per unit volume", Fagan added. At the Hyperscale end of the market, speed is an important but not the main factor and it is likely that the players would settle for low-speed spinning hard disk drives that would probably consume (and dissipate) less power but also vibrate less and be less prone to failure.

Other than a form factor shift, other ways of dramatically increasing storage density are being explored. SMR, commonly known as Shingles, provides with a 40% improvement in capacity but because it takes a hit on random writes, is better suited for archiving. "You don't do random writes on tapes, do you", joked Fagan. The man has a point.

He dismissed HGST's use of helium in hard disk drives saying that it is a "one-hit wonder" and is "expensive" to pull together. The technology, Helioseal, allowed HGST to hit the 10TB capacity because it can cram up to seven platters rather than the industry standard of five.

Where is storage going?

HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording) is where the future lies according to Fagan. While hard drives currently hit one terabit per square inch, HAMR can potentially help vendors hit 50 terabit per square inch. But Seagate, it seems, wants to squeeze as much capacity as possible from existing technologies before embracing HAMR and Bit Patterned Media.

The future of storage not only lies in cramming more bits but also down to the very nature of storage devices. Technologies like Seagate's own object storage project, Kinetic, are changing the way how data is accessed and the arrival of flash storage allowed hybrid solutions to evolve. "We still see value in solid state hybrid drives", Fagan said, "our focus is on tweaking how multiple caches interact with each other and this will really accelerate enterprise performance".

As for the future of the humble hard drive, Fagan had a twinkle in his eyes. "We can bring more processing power on the hard drive" when asked whether adding more features (real time encryption, inline deduplication, real-time compression) to the HDD would make sense. How meaningful would that be? "That would need to be done in relationship with the wider industry."

He ended our conversation by saying "Now is an inflexion point. For the future, we subscribe to [the concept of] software defined storage."