NVIDIA today announced a new wave of networking switches, the X800 series, designed for massive-scale AI. The world's first networking platforms capable of end-to-end 800 Gb/s throughput, NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and NVIDIA Spectrum -X800 Ethernet push the boundaries of networking performance for computing and AI workloads. They feature software that further accelerates AI, cloud, data processing and HPC applications in every type of data center, including those that incorporate the newly released NVIDIA Blackwell architecture-based product lineup.

"NVIDIA Networking is central to the scalability of our AI supercomputing infrastructure," said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA X800 switches are end-to-end networking platforms that enable us to achieve trillion-parameter-scale generative AI essential for new AI infrastructures."

Hitachi LG Data Storage, SK hynix's global distributor has recently unveiled the 'Tube T31,' a novel USB stick-type SSD, in Japan and Korea. This innovative product aims to alleviate the storage constraints of gaming devices like PlayStation 5 and Xbox. The Tube T31 features a sleek and lightweight design, making it suitable for a variety of devices including gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, and smart TVs. With an impressive transfer rate of 10 Gbps and sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,000 MB/s, it meets the demands of avid gamers.

Following its favorable reception in Japan and Korea, Hitachi LG Data Storage is preparing for a global launch of the Tube T31, with a special spring promotion targeted at console gaming enthusiasts worldwide. The promotion is tailored specifically for customers in 10 countries, including the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, and Singapore.

The 43rd edition of the Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, held annually in Kyoto Japan, is charting the way forward for the devices of the future. Held between June 11-16, 2023, this year's symposium will see structured presentations, Q&A, and discussions on some of the biggest technological developments in the logic chip world. The lead (plenary) sessions drop a major hint on the way the wind is blowing. Leadning from the front is an address by Suraya Bhattacharya, Director, System-in-Package, A*STAR, IME, on "Multi-Chiplet Heterogeneous Integration Packaging for Semiconductor System Scaling."

Companies such as AMD and Intel read the tea-leaves, that Moore's Law is buckling, and it's no longer economically feasible to build large monolithic processors at the kind of prices they commanded a decade ago. This has caused companies to ration their allocation of the latest foundry node to only the specific components of their chip design that benefit the most from the latest node, and identify components that don't benefit as much, and disintegrate them into separate dies build on older foundry nodes, which are then connected through innovative packaging technologies.

As of June 30, 2020, Backblaze had 142,630 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,271 boot drives and 140,059 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. As always, we look forward to your comments.

Quarterly Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q2 2020
At the end of Q2 2020, Backblaze was using 140,059 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 139,867 hard drives in our review. The table below covers what happened in Q2 2020.

Overview
At the end of 2017 we had 93,240 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,935 boot drives and 91,305 data drives. This post looks at the hard drive statistics of the data drives we monitor. We'll review the stats for Q4 2017, all of 2017, and the lifetime statistics for all of the drives Backblaze has used in our cloud storage data centers since we started keeping track.

Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q4 2017
At the end of Q4 2017 Backblaze was monitoring 91,305 hard drives used to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives which were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (read why after the chart). This leaves us with 91,243 hard drives. The table below is for the period of Q4 2017.

The Toshiba-Samsung consortium TSST (Toshiba-Samsung Storage Technology) has reportedly stopped production of optical drives. TSST manufactured CDRW+DVDR, DVDRW+BDR, and BDRW drives under the Samsung brand. Samsung and Toshiba co-founded TSST in 2004 to manufacture optical drives under the Samsung brand name, and to make unbranded OEM optical drives for use in Toshiba and Samsung branded notebooks.

Samsung had to partner with Toshiba as it held the requisite optical disc technology licenses and patents. LG Electronics similarly partnered with Hitachi, another founding-member of several optical disc standard SIGs, to make up HL-DT (Hitachi-LG Data-Storage Technology), and sell drives under the LG brand. Speaking to KitGuru, a TSST sales manager stated "it's true that TSST(Samsung ODD) stopped production from Mid-April." All is not over for TSST, though. "We will continue the ODD business aggressively to obtain about 50% of market share," and will "release a new ODD to the market," he added.

Hard drive major Seagate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of abnormally high failure rates for its 1.5 TB and 3 TB internal and external/portable hard drives. It also accuses the company of false claims over "reliability" and "dependability" in its marketing.

The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.

Russian cyber-security company Kaspersky Labs exposed a breakthrough U.S. spying program, which taps into one of the most widely proliferated PC components - hard drives. With the last 5 years seeing the number of hard drive manufacturing nations reduce from three (Korean Samsung, Japanese Hitachi and Toshiba, and American Seagate and WD) to one (American Seagate or WD), swallowing-up or partnering with Japanese and Korean businesses as US-based subsidiaries or spin-offs such as HGST, a shadow of suspicion has been cast on Seagate and WD.

According to Kaspersky, American cyber-surveillance agency, the NSA, is taking advantage of the centralization of hard-drive manufacturing to the US, by making WD and Seagate embed its spying back-doors straight into the hard-drive firmware, which lets the agency directly access raw data, agnostic of partition method (low-level format), file-system (high-level format), operating system, or even user access-level. Kaspersky says it found PCs in 30 countries with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced today the pricing of the previously announced underwritten secondary public offering of 10,869,566 shares of its common stock by Hitachi, Ltd. (the "Selling Stockholder"), at a price to the public of $67.00 per share. The Selling Stockholder has also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,630,434 shares.

An aggregate amount of 25 million shares of the company's common stock were issued to the Selling Stockholder in connection with Western Digital's acquisition of Viviti Technologies Ltd., formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Holdings Pte. Ltd., in March 2012. Upon completion of the offering, the Selling Stockholder will beneficially own 14,130,434 shares of the company's common stock (12,500,000 shares if the underwriters exercise in full their option to purchase additional shares) and will continue to have two designated directors on the company's board of directors pursuant to the terms of an investor rights agreement between the company and the Selling Stockholder.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company,) continues to push technology innovation by offering the highest storage density (MB/mm³) of any hard disk drive (HDD) today. The new Travelstar 5K1500 is the industry's first 9.5 mm, 1.5 TB mobile hard drive and features the industry's highest capacity in a standard 9.5 mm design. Built on HGST's proven platform for quality and reliability, the Travelstar 5K1500 delivers high shock protection, low power and solid performance to meet the growing demands for a variety of market segments, including notebooks, external hard drives, gaming consoles and all-in-one desktop PCs.

The HGST three-platter Travelstar 5K1500 offers 50 percent more capacity than currently shipping 1 TB 2.5-inch 9.5 mm HDDs and 200 percent more capacity than single-disk 500 GB 7 mm or 5 mm 2.5-inch HDDs, making them ideal for capacity-hungry devices. With better PCMark Vantage and PCMark 7 performance than currently shipping two-platter HGST 5,400 RPM models, all Travelstar 5K1500 drives ship with a 32 MB cache buffer and 6 Gbps SATA interface.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) is leading the disk drive industry to the forefront in nanolithography, long the exclusive purview of semiconductor manufacturers, by creating and replicating minute features that will allow the doubling of hard disk drive (HDD) density in future disk drives.

HGST Labs announced today they have combined two innovative nanotechnologies -- self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting -- to create large areas of dense patterns of magnetic islands only 10 billionths of a meter (10 nanometers) wide. These features are only about 50 atoms wide and some 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that Mark Long has been named executive vice president of strategy and corporate development. Long has an extensive background in corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance and investment banking. He will oversee Western Digital's strategic planning and be responsible for the company's corporate development activities. Long will also lead Western Digital Capital, a strategic investment fund targeting innovative companies within the broader storage industry and related markets aligned to Western Digital's strategic plan.

"Mark is an excellent addition to the Western Digital senior leadership team," said Steve Milligan , president and chief executive officer, Western Digital. "He brings tremendous strategic and operational ability to this role, including an extensive background in mergers and acquisitions. He will focus on executing our growth strategy and capitalizing on the many opportunities present in today's dynamic storage industry."

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the industry's highest-capacity 10,000 RPM, enterprise-class hard drive - the Ultrastar C10K1200. Providing a capacity extension to HGST's proven Ultrastar C10K900 product line, the new 2.5-inch Ultrastar C10K1200 features a SAS 6Gb/s interface for reliable data throughput, a 64MB cache buffer for optimized read/write response time, and a fast 10K rotational speed for reliable high-performance computing. All this, combined with the drive's low power, high capacity and high performance attributes, results in higher density servers, blades and network storage arrays that helps reduce space requirements, lowers cooling costs and improves total cost of ownership (TCO).

Increasing storage needs, shrinking floor space and budgets, and reducing power and cooling are just a few challenges that datacenter managers face today, making it challenging to scale and sustain business growth. Whether building datacenters for public clouds, private clouds or traditional datacenters, adopting the right tiered storage strategy delivers greater efficiencies in terms of reliability, performance, capacity and power, and can make a vast difference in the ability to lower TCO.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) today announced that it's shipping the industry's first 1 TB, 9.5 mm, 2.5-inch, 7,200 RPM hard disk drive (HDD). The new Travelstar HDD is available in the HGST Hard Drive Retail Kit as well as in the award-winning Touro Mobile Pro USB 3.0 external storage solution for simple add-on storage and backup.

HGST Hard Drive Retail Kit
The new Travelstar 1 TB, 2.5-inch 7,200 RPM hard drive is ideally suited for upgrading notebooks, game consoles, and other high-capacity, high-performance personal storage products. This standard 9.5 mm drive leverages Advanced Format, which increases the physical sector size from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes to improve drive capacities and error correction capabilities. With 7,200 RPM performance, 32 MB cache buffer and a 6 Gb/SATA interface, the drive delivers the highest 7,200 RPM mobile HDD performance in PCMark Vantage benchmark testing, which results in faster downloads and better application performance than 7,200 and 5,400 RPM 2.5-inch HDDs.

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted year-over-year growth of 3.3%, totaling just over $5.9 billion, in the third quarter of 2012 (3Q12), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market posted just under $7.9 billion in revenues, representing 3.7% growth from the prior year's third quarter. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reach 7,104 petabytes, growing 24.4% year over year.

"The external disk storage system market continues to exhibit steady growth, posting solid third quarter factory revenues of just over $5.9 billion," said Liz Conner, senior research analyst, Storage Systems. "End users continue to invest in storage infrastructures despite persistent concerns surrounding global and regional economies. Helping to drive the worldwide market in the third quarter was the double-digit growth in multi-protocol storage architecture and strong demand for upper mid-range and high-end storage."

The 1 TB, 2.5 inch HDD is the world's first SATA III (6 Gb/s) hard disk drive , and Eurocom is the first to offer it in such a small form factor netbook. Adding the advanced storage technology of the Hitachi Travel Start 5K1000 to the EUROCOM Monster allows Eurocom to meet user's demand for super large storage capacity and high performance .

"The EUROCOM Monster is like we stuffed a High Performance Notebook into a Netbook form factor, it always had the performance and now it can be customized with a massive amount of high capacity 1 TB, high speed 6 Gb/s SATA storage, in other words, the Monster lives inside of this beast!" Mark Bialic, Eurocom President.

Western Digital Corp. today announced that Steve Milligan will become chief executive officer of the company on January 2, 2013, succeeding John Coyne, who is retiring on that same date. Milligan, 49, is currently president of Western Digital and will retain the title of president when he becomes CEO. Following Coyne's retirement, Milligan will be appointed to the Western Digital board of directors.

"We are grateful to John Coyne for his many years of dedication and strong leadership," said Tom Pardun, chairman of the board. "He and his team have strategically positioned the company at the center of the storage industry, as a consistently profitable market and technology leader well positioned to address the tremendous opportunities in the changing digital world.

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) today announced that Gary Gentry has rejoined Seagate to lead its solid state drive (SSD) business as senior vice president, SSD. Mr. Gentry will have responsibility for driving Seagate leadership in the SSD space, with time-to-market, competitive product offerings. He will be located in Longmont, Colorado and will report directly to Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer.

Mr. Gentry has over 25 years of experience in the storage industry, including most recently as the general manager of the Enterprise SSD Division of Micron Corporation. Prior to rejoining Seagate, he held leadership positions focusing on solid-state technologies at Spansion Corporation and Storage Genetics. He also served as chief marketing officer for Maxtor, and provided strategic consulting to Hitachi Global Storage Systems. While at Seagate he held various management positions including vice president, strategic marketing and planning.

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has appointed Kensuke Oka and Masahiro Yamamura to its board of directors, effective May 17, 2012. Mr. Oka is president and CEO of Hitachi America, Ltd., and Mr. Yamamura is corporate officer, general manager of the Semiconductor Business Division of Hitachi, Ltd.

"The additions of Mr. Oka and Mr. Yamamura offer our leadership team vital insight as we operate WD and HGST as independent subsidiaries in the competitive hard drive industry," said Thomas Pardun, WD chairman of the board. "Both have deep executive management experience leading operations in the electronics and industrial systems industries, primarily for Hitachi, providing new perspectives to WD as we continue our focus on sustained profitable growth."

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NYSE: WDC) today announced a new family of CinemaStar 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) for the growing traditional and small form factor audio/video (A/V) and consumer electronics (CE) HDD markets. With continued technological advancements and increased capacities, 2.5-inch hard drives are satisfying the needs of both the traditional 3.5-inch CE market as well as the small form factor market, while allowing OEMs to design smaller, more compact A/V streaming devices.

From slim 7mm z-height 500GB HDDs to high-capacity, 2.5-inch, 9.5mm 1TB HDDs, HGST's new CinemaStar family targets the vast majority of CE capacity needs, while providing the right balance of performance, low power and quiet acoustics for multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs) and set-top-boxes (STBs). Now in its sixth generation, each CinemaStar drive is fine-tuned with advanced streaming technology to efficiently optimize the 24/7 recording and playback of A/V content.

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has completed its divestiture of certain 3.5-inch hard drive assets to Toshiba Corporation, as required by regulatory agencies that conditionally approved the company's completed acquisition of Viviti Technologies Ltd. (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies).

The assets will enable Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets and will enhance its ability to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for near-line (business critical) applications.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) today announced the storage industry's first technology demonstration of a 12 gigabit per second (12 Gb/s) SAS solid state drive (SSD), representing the next performance step in the evolution of SAS, the preferred interface technology for enterprise servers and storage solutions. HGST is participating in the 12 Gb/s SAS demonstration at the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase on May 9, 2012, at the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif.

SAS SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs), with their rich SCSI heritage, continue to be the building blocks of choice for enterprise and cloud storage. Enabling next-generation storage solutions, 12 Gb/s SAS is a broadly supported industry standard as it delivers twice the throughput compared to today's 6 Gb/s SAS solutions, while maintaining established enterprise protocols and attributes. It is also backward compatible with 6 Gb/s SAS for investment protection in current SAS infrastructures.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced that it has expanded its portfolio of Hitachi Compute Systems with the addition of the new Hitachi Compute Blade 500. The new blade server is the first Hitachi Data Systems product to incorporate the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-2600. The open, flexible architecture and high-performance, high-availability features of Hitachi Compute Blade 500 make it an ideal platform for virtualized infrastructures and demanding cloud applications.

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) today introduced the world's first 4 TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000.

Ushering in a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. Hungry for massive storage, cloud and Internet businesses are redefining the datacenter by designing new types of servers and storage architectures to help manage explosive petabyte (PB) growth. Critical to their datacenter infrastructure is the ability to scale and efficiently manage performance, power and storage space to help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

Ethisphere released its latest list of World's Most Ethical (WME) companies. The list honors companies for ethical practices. In its own words, Ethisphere defines WME companies as "companies that truly go beyond making statements about doing business "ethically" and translate those words into action. WME honorees not only promote ethical business standards and practices internally, they exceed legal compliance minimums and shape future industry standards by introducing best practices today."

Sorted by industry, you will find two short sections covering computer hardware and computer software. Under the hardware section, Intel Corporation is the only other honoree than Hitachi Data Systems. Microsoft and Adobe are honorees as some of the most ethical computer software companies. Find the complete list (sorted by industry) here.