Last week Synology put out a press release on its European website, informing its customers that the Plus Series—which starts with simple two bay devices—will only support its own brand of hard drives, if you want to be able to take advantage of basic NAS features like creating a storage pool or do a lifespan analysis. More advanced features like volume-wide deduplication will also not be available. Synology has already done this on its XS Plus and rack mounted NAS appliances—which in itself wouldn't be acceptable to many considering getting a NAS—but at least these are pricier, high-end devices. Now the company has moved down to the $300 price bracket, which just doesn't sit right.

Admittedly this will only affect new customers, as the company will start to roll out the limitation with its 2025 SKUs and all other models will continue to work as is. The problem here is that Synology isn't a hard drive manufacturer and according to Arstechnica, the company is simply re-branding Toshiba hard drives and charges an extra $50 or so for their basic tier of drives, with higher-end tiers having a much higher premium. Synology obviously claims that this is for the benefit of their customers and you can find the full statement below. However, we doubt many customers will be happy to pay extra for something that was working just fine, until Synology figured out it could charge its customers extra for it. For now, there has been no indication that this will happen outside of the European market, but it's likely to be rolled out globally, as something like this is rarely limited to one market.

Seagate is advancing in NVMe technology for large-capacity hard drives as the growing storage needs in AI systems and apps continue to rise. Old and current storage setups struggle to handle the huge datasets needed for machine learning, which now reach petabyte and even exabyte sizes. Today's storage options have many drawbacks for AI tasks. SSD-based systems offer the needed speed however it is not cost-effective for storing large AI training data. SAS/SATA hard drives are cheaper however, the interfaces rely on proprietary silicon, host bus adapters (HBAs), and controller architectures that struggle with the high-throughput, low-latency needs of AI's high data flow.

Seagate's "new idea" is to use NVMe technology in large-capacity hard drives. This creates a solution that keeps hard drives cost-effective and dense while boosting performance for AI apps. NVMe hard drives will not need HBAs, protocol bridges, and additional SAS infrastructure, allowing seamless scalability by integrating high-density hard drive storage with high-speed SSD caching in a unified NVMe architecture.

Last week, Heise.de published an extensive article that covered numerous purchases of problematic Seagate hard drives. A portion of the German publication's readership banded together, following an initial report of one individual's experience with—supposedly—new 14 TB Seagate Exos HDD units. Heise.de received fifty follow-up stories from its audience—a clear pattern emerged from this large volume of feedback. According to various bits of evidence, twelve retail locations were caught selling used/refurbished Seagate products—disappointed customers were led into believing that were acquiring "brand new" stock. Last week's report documented examples with visible physical wear and tear, and software diagnostics revealed prior operational usage—around 10,000 to 50,000 hours. Heise.de placed an order with the original source, but this transaction was canceled—the Seagate Exos 14 TB and 16 TB models were no longer in stock rotation.

Tom's Hardware kept tabs on the events unfolding in Germany, and contacted Seagate for comment. A freshly released article contains the storage specialist's official response, but the spokesperson did not disclose any information regarding root causes. The statement started with: "Seagate did not sell or distribute these fraudulent drives to resellers...We recommend that resellers only purchase drives from certified Seagate distribution partners to ensure that they purchase and sell only new or factory-recertified Seagate drives...hard drives that have been refurbished and factory-certified by Seagate and resold as part of the Seagate Drive Circularity Program can be identified by the green-bordered white hard drive label and the designation: Factory Recertified."

Toshiba today introduced the updated N300 series 3.5-inch internal SATA hard drives targeting NAS applications. These drives come with new product branding the company introduced with its recent S300 series HDDs for surveillance/NVR applications. The drives come in capacities of 2 TB, 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, 10 TB, 12 TB, 14 TB, 16 TB, 18 TB, 20 TB, and 22 TB, with the higher capacity models—12 TB and above—being helium-filled, to reduce power/noise characteristics. All models in the series come with CMR (conventional magnetic recording), which ensures predictable write and rewrite performance. The drives come with 7,200 RPM spindle-speed, and depending on the capacity variant, between 64 MB to 512 MB of write cache. The drives come with SATA 6 Gbps host interface, and offer sequential transfer speeds of up to 281 MB/s reads, with up to 268 MB/s writes, with an MTBF rated between 1-1.2 million hours.

Apricorn, the leading manufacturer of software-free, 256-bit AES XTS hardware-encrypted USB data storage devices, today announced the release of a 24 TB version of its Aegis Padlock DT and Padlock DT FIPS Desktop Drives. Continuing its position as an industry leader, Apricorn is the first to bring a 24 TB encrypted drive to market, delivering high performance and mass capacity to industries such as healthcare, financial services, education, and government, while ensuring the security of users' data. This is the third time Apricorn has brought to market the industry's largest capacity hardware encrypted USB drive, having previously done so in 20 TB and 22 TB sizes.

"Microsoft this month disclosed that the nation state attack it identified in January was still not fully contained. Since Microsoft is so deeply entrenched in just about every facet of our workflow, encrypting and storing data offline adds a layer of protection and resilience in the face of potential future attacks that could stem from breaches of this nature," said Kurt Markley, U.S. Managing Director at Apricorn. "The Aegis Padlock DT line is an ideal way for large organizations to protect vast amounts of data at rest in a highly secure and economic way."

ASUSTOR Inc. has updated the hard drive compatibility list by adding Seagate's IronWolf Pro 24 TB high-capacity NAS hard drive. The listed model is ST24000NT002. IronWolf Pro is designed for businesses and those that want the very most in data capacity. Using Seagate's 24 TB hard drives in conjunction with the largest ASUSTOR NAS devices means that some ASUSTOR NAS devices can support up to just under 400 TB.

24 TB drives also help ASUSTOR's MyArchive feature. The use of 24 TB hard drives helps make the backup process with MyArchive easier by using fewer drives. This helps facilitate safe 3-2-1 backups as well as providing as much archival storage as needed. Need even more space? Use the Xpanstor 4, one of the only expansion units featuring a 10 Gbps USB interface. It also supports MyArchive cold backup technology even on NAS devices that don't support hard drives. In addition to the additional 96 TB storage space provided by the four hard drive bays, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port greatly increases the performance.

Today, Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, launched the new Seagate IronWolf Pro 24 TB hard drive addresses the evolving data demands of SMB and enterprise network attached storage (NAS) environments. With capacities ranging from 2 TB to 24 TB, the Seagate IronWolf Pro portfolio is built to scale the needs of any growing business. With sustained transfer rates of 285 MB/s, a user workload rating of up to 550 TB/year, and 2.5M hours mean time between failures (MTBF), the new Seagate IronWolf Pro drives are engineered to deliver 24x7 uninterrupted performance, reliability, and dependability in multi-bay and multi-user collaborative environments.

The drives are optimized for NAS systems with Seagate's AgileArray technology. Using dual-plane balancing and time-limited error recovery (TLER), AgileArray helps deliver best-in-class performance in multi-bay systems. Additionally, the drives offer built-in rotational vibration (RV) sensors paired with dual plane balancing that addresses vibrations to deliver consistent high performance and reliability.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in data storage technology and solutions, introduced the new Seagate Exos X24 hard drives. With 10 disks delivering 2.4 TB each, the Exos X24 is Seagate's highest density hard drive, offering industry leading total cost of ownership (TCO) for hyperscale customers and enterprises with scale-out data centers. The conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based 24 TB Exos X24 delivers market-leading capacity, high performance, and enterprise-class reliability. Seagate also continues to offer limited cloud customers the flexibility of a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) Exos X24 configuration at a capacity of up to 28 TB.

Designed for maximum storage capacity and the highest rack-space efficiency, Exos X24 is purpose-built for hyperscale with powerful performance and proven technology. The new helium 3.5-inch 7200 RPM nearline drive offers both SATA and SAS interfaces and delivers enhanced caching that performs up to three times better than solutions that only utilize read or write caching.

Western Digital today introduces new solutions from its SanDisk brand and SanDisk Professional line ahead of IBC2023, further enriching its ecosystem of digital content storage solutions for the broadcasting, media and entertainment industry. These pro-grade products, which include two new desktop hard drive solutions and a memory card, offer the quality and dependability required for production-level video workflows without compromising the premium design.

"It is exciting to see Western Digital continue to expand its Thunderbolt offerings, which provide the higher-end capabilities and reliability that the media and entertainment industry needs," said Jason Ziller, General Manager, Client Connectivity Division, Intel Corporation. "By utilizing the power of our Thunderbolt technology, enterprise-class hard drives and multi-device connectivity solutions support prosumers and creative professionals, and their increasingly complex demands and innovative use cases."

TerraMaster, a professional brand that focuses on providing innovative storage products for homes and businesses, recently released new design NAS series F2-212, F4-212 and U4-212, support TRAID, BTRFS file system, Snapshot and TFSS providing stronger data backup and better home multimedia experience, which perfectly meet the requirement of personal and home users. Among the 3 models, the sample of F2-212 for review will be firstly available soon in August.

More Modern Exterior Design
The 212 NAS series adopts brand-new design elements and color matching, and has a more fashionable and modern appearance design, better heat dissipation, lower noise, and more convenient installation and use.

US authorities have imposed a $300 million penalty on Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a market leader in data storage solutions, for an alleged violation of export controls. The US Commerce Department has investigated the California-based company's business dealings with Chinese hardware firm Huawei Technologies Co. Limited, specifically for the sale of hard disk drives to operations within mainland China. It has found that Seagate has broken the "foreign direct product (FDP) rule" that was established by the US Government back in 2020. Seagate is said to have sold approximately 7.4 million hard drive units to Huawei after the period in which the new rulings took effect - the total value of these shipments was estimated in the region of $1.1 billion.

The US government's serving of a civil penalty to Seagate appears to be part of a larger drive to prevent North American tech companies from selling advanced computer equipment to Chinese firms. Two other suppliers (not named) of storage solutions had agreed to the government imposed terms and ceased trade with Huawei in 2020. In contrast, Seagate has seemingly become a record breaking heretic according to a statement released yesterday by the Bureau of Industry (BIS) and Security: "This historic foreign direct product enforcement case and settlement represents the largest standalone administrative penalty in BIS history. Today's resolution also includes a multi-year audit requirement and a five-year suspended Denial Order. In August 2020, the Bureau of Industry and Security imposed controls over certain foreign-produced items related to Huawei. Despite this, in September 2020, Seagate announced it would continue to do business with Huawei. Seagate did so despite the fact that its only two competitors had stopped selling HDDs to Huawei, resulting in Seagate becoming Huawei's sole source provider of HDDs."

At the NAB 2023 conference, Seagate Technology, a world leader in data storage infrastructure solutions, and QNAP Systems Inc., a leading network attached storage (NAS) vendor, announced their integrated portfolio of edge to cloud enterprise storage solutions. Developed to help small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) and content creators manage data from edge to cloud, the portfolio delivers a range of innovative enterprise-scale solutions that include Seagate's IronWolf Pro Hard Drives (HDD), QNAP's high-capacity NAS solutions with Exos E series JBOD systems and Seagate Lyve Cloud.

"Businesses that use data at the edge often rely on NAS devices to store their data. As that data capacity increases and requires optimal protection, businesses are faced with the challenge of backing up data off site," said BS Teh, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Seagate. "Seagate and QNAP have come together to address this challenge with an entire portfolio of secure mass capacity data solutions to help SMBs address pain points and address the rising costs of data storage and management."

Toshiba may have spun off its flash memory business into Kioxia, but the company still makes mechanical hard-drives and derivative products such as portable HDDs. At the 2023 International CES, the company showed off its Canvio Gaming line of portable HDDs. These USB 3.1 portable hard drives come in capacities of up to 4 TB, and support both Xbox and PlayStation consoles, where they can be used to store entire libraries of games that can be made ready to play faster than fetching the game from the Internet.

The Canvio Advance series targets professionals on the move providing storage of up to 4 TB, with auto-backup both to itself and the cloud (though your PC), and data-encryption. The Canvio Ready and Canvio Flex target consumer use-cases. The latter in particular has a broad device compatibility spanning PCs, Macs, tablets, and handhelds, with USB-C and type-A interfaces. Lastly there's the N300 line of enterprise hard drives targeting NAS applications, which come in capacities of up to 18 TB, with up to 7,200 RPM spindle speed, and CMR recording (no SMR). These drives are designed for 24x7 operation, come with up to 1.2 million hours MTTF at 300 TB/year workload, and are backed by 5-year warranties.

Today, Star Wars fans have another way to feel the power of the Force with three new collectible Seagate Hard Disk Drives (HDD) inspired by heroes and villains of the Star Wars galaxy. Featuring Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Han Solo, the latest additions to the company's line of licensed special edition storage devices bring speed, capacity, and striking appearance to the battle stations of Star Wars collectors and tech enthusiasts.

The special edition FireCuda external hard drives represent the famed characters with three unique aesthetics: the courage of Luke Skywalker, the raw power of Darth Vader, and the confidence of the galaxy's favorite smuggler, Han Solo. The drives offer customizable RGB LED lighting and each design features a default custom character light out-of-the-box: a forceful blue for Luke Skywalker, a wrathful red for Darth Vader, and a white glow reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon for Han Solo. With built-in and customizable lighting options, all three of the drives enable Star Wars enthusiasts and gamers to awaken the powers of the Force at home.

When it comes to data, everything is growing - quantity, size, format, resolution, use cases, applications, value and more. As people and businesses look for solutions to effectively and efficiently store their data in the zettabyte era, Western Digital HDDs continue to play a critical role in delivering massive capacity, performance and reliability.

Extending its innovation and technology leadership across its portfolio, Western Digital today announced that it is now shipping new 22 TB HDDs targeting three key segments: WD Gold HDDs for IT/data center channel customers; WD Red Pro for network attached storage (NAS); and WD Purple Pro for smart video/surveillance. As highlighted in its What's Next Western Digital Event, these new drives are loaded with industry-firsts, including OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal to deliver the industry's highest areal density at 2.2 TB per platter, delivering 22 TB CMR HDDs for its customers.

With only three major players left in the hard disk drive market-Seagate, Toshiba and WDC-the shipment of hard drives ought to be fairly stable, but demand is down across all manufacturers by anything from close to 30 percent to around 40 percent in the case of Toshiba. According to data from Trendfocus that was posted by Storage Newsletter, demand is down across all market segments or at best case flat compared to last year. Nearline enterprise drives remained flat at around 19 million units compared to last year, but performance enterprise storage is down to around 2.5 million units for the last quarter.

On the desktop and consumer electronics side of things, things are even more dire, with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive shipments dropping by 30 and 40 percent respectively. Around 13 million 3.5-inch hard drives and 11 million 2.5-inch drives were still shipped in Q2, but with lower demand for computers and more and more computers moving to SSDs, hard drives have been relegated to backup duties when it comes to most consumer purchases. Seagate was the company least affected by the drop in demand, but is still seeing close to a 30 percent drop in demand, with WDC second at over 30 percent and Toshiba, as mentioned, by maybe as much as 40 percent, which doesn't bode well for the company, as it's the smallest manufacturer of hard drives.

Today, Seagate celebrates Star Wars Day with the introduction of three collectible Hard Disk Drives (HDD) inspired by Boba Fett, Grogu, and The Mandalorian. Released on the fan holiday playing off of the popular Star Wars quote "May the Force be with you," the newest additions to the company's line of licensed special edition storage devices bring a tangible piece of the galaxy to the hands of collectors and tech enthusiasts.

"We are thrilled to announce the latest release in our ongoing collaboration with Lucasfilm, bringing three fresh and iconic designs to gamers and Star Wars fans," said Jeff Fochtman, senior vice president of business and marketing at Seagate Technology. "From the designs to the functionality of the drives, this release brings a force to the battle stations of Star Wars enthusiasts."

Synology has announced the launch of its new HAS5300 series 3.5" SAS hard drives to meet growing demand for high-capacity, high-performance, and resilient storage systems in enterprise environments. Available in 16 TB, 12 TB, and 8 TB models, the HAS5300 drives are the latest addition to Synology's range of enterprise hard drives, following the release of the HAT5300 series SATA drives in January. They are perfect companions to Synology's high-performance and highly scalable SA and UC series storage solutions.

With support for 550 TB/year workloads and rated for a 2.5 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), HAS5300 SAS drives are built to deliver consistent and class-leading performance in the most intense environments. Persistent write cache technology further helps ensure data integrity for your mission-critical applications.

Continuously innovating to help organizations keep pace with rapidly expanding volumes of data, Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that it is extending its HDD technology and capacity leadership into its broader portfolio of data center solutions. Leveraging innovations from the Ultrastar 18 TB and 20 TB HDD technology platform, the WD Gold family now features new 16 TB and 18 TB CMR HDD capacities. Also available are an upgraded line of Ultrastar JBOD platforms and an Ultrastar hybrid storage server featuring Ultrastar 16 TB and 18 TB CMR HDDs. Through Western Digital's vertical integration capabilities and broad portfolio, the company continues to be uniquely positioned to help customers meet data demands as they design their storage infrastructures for better efficiency and productivity.

"Western Digital's expanded family of data center HDD solutions clearly addresses a variety of customer needs, which puts them in a unique early position to capitalize on cloud and OEM customer transitions to 18 TB, and even to 20 TB for those optimizing the benefits of SMR," said John Chen, vice president at TRENDFOCUS. "Capacity-enterprise HDDs will continue to dominate the nearline and secondary storage market as there is simply no other cost-effective substitute for data at scale. As a result, we expect nearline disk drive exabytes shipments to grow at a 32.5% CAGR, reaching 1.9 zettabytes by 2024."

Western Digital announced that it has started shipping the industry's highest-capacity HDD samples to enterprise OEMs and hyperscale customers worldwide. The 20 TB Ultrastar DC HC650 SMR HDDs and 18 TB Ultrastar DC HC550 CMR HDDs, first previewed in June 2019, and announced in September 2019, feature its first-ever commercial implementation of energy-assisted magnetic recording technology on a nine-disk platform, enabling customers to more efficiently provision and scale their data center environments with unmatched total cost of ownership.

With zettabyte-scale data growth, the need for higher-capacity data storage across a broad spectrum of applications and workloads can be reliably met only with high Capacity Enterprise HDDs. The industry-leading capacities of Western Digital's Ultrastar 20 TB SMR and 18 TB CMR HelioSeal HDDs enable customers to deploy up to 22 percent fewer racks and reduce their TCO by up to 11 percent, along with the corresponding reductions in power consumption, cooling costs, and data center infrastructure needs when compared with today's 14 TB CMR HDDs.

Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in data storage solutions, today announced it has been actively shipping 16TB helium-based enterprise drives as part of the Exos X16 family, delivering high performance and record capacity for hyperscale data centers to efficiently and cost-effectively manage ever-increasing amounts of data. The company also updated the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive lines with new 16TB capacity models.

The need for hyperscale, cloud, and NAS storage solutions continues to rise to unprecedented levels. In fact, a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate predicts that the Global Datasphere - the amount of data created, captured or replicated across the globe - will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025. Seagate's Exos X16 hard drive delivers the highest storage density available with the field-proven reliability and continuous high performance to support a broad range of workload requirements and high-availability use cases.

Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. today announces a new addition to its popular family of CANVIO external hard drives (HDDs), a 4 TB option in its ADVANCE, BASICS and READY series. The 4 TB option gives up to 33 percent extra storage (compared to 3 TB) for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that want to store large files and back up their data. Using 1TB platter technology allows the 4 TB CANVIO models to maintain the same low-profile design as 3 TB models. All models support Windows and Mac operating systems and are compatible with both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.

CANVIO HDDs combine a sleek, slim and stylish design with practical features such as a ramp-load design to prevent internal wear, plug-and-play functionality, backup and security software (available on the ADVANCE models), and a range of more flexible capacity options of 1 TB, 2 TB, and now 4 TB.

Do you know what's better than a 10 TB HDD? A 100 TB HDD. Seagate has published a product roadmap showing the evolution of their HDDs in the next few years. According to that roadmap, we'll be able to buy a 100 TB hard drive in 2025. Other makers such as Western Digital talked about 40 TB drives in 2025 thanks to MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, but it seems Seagate is even more optimistic, and in fact they'll use HDMR (Heated Dot Magnetic Recording), an evolution of the HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology.

Seagate expects to have 20 TB HAMR-HDDs by 2020, and from that moment on they'll continue to work on this technology to launch 36 TB HDDs by 2022, 48 TB drives before 2024 and that 100 TB units in 2025. HAMR will enable double areal density growth each 2.5 years according to Seagate. The current PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology could disappear in that future, and it seems HDDs will continue to be a valuable asset for those who look for the cheapest price per GB.

Next level value for money meets maximum airflow and RGB illumination in the new SilentiumPC Regnum RG4T(F) RGB chassis. Based on a dual-chamber internal layout, it offers functionality and solutions for all modern system requirements, supports up to 380 mm long graphics cards and up to 159 mm tall CPU coolers.

To ensure proper cooling properties Regnum RG4T(F) RGB has a mesh-type front panel and comes equipped with three quiet 120 mm RGB case fans. The system can be extended to up to six fans in total, which can be controlled via the built-in fan controller. Liquid cooling enthusiasts will appreciate radiator mounting spots at the top (120/240) and front (120/240/360) for either various AIO solutions or custom loops. The interior is cleverly divided into two thermally independent chambers, allowing for more effective cooling. Power Supply Units and Hard Drives are mounted in the lower chamber and the other components in the main chamber on top. The Regnum RG4T(F) RGB is equipped with three pre-installed dust filters, located at the front, top and the bottom to keep the interior dust-free. Convenient cable management is achieved thanks to numerous pass-through openings and cable tie points.

Toshiba, a committed technology leader, announces the MN07 Series 12 TB and 14 TB 3.5-inch hard disk drives for use in NAS platforms. The Toshiba MN07 Series utilizes a helium-sealed mechanical design to achieve the massive 14 TB and 12 TB capacity. The 14 TB model improves power efficiency by approximately 55 percent (W/GB) over the previous 10 TB "air" 7,200 rpm mechanical designs.

The MN07 Series is designed for use in NAS appliances with eight or more drive bays and is suitable for NAS file and object storage applications that require disk drives with workload ratings of up to 180 TB per year. The MN07 models feature vibration compensation technology and advanced Format (AF) 512e sector technology. Additionally, both devices offer 24/7 operability, superior reliability with MTTF of 1.0 Million hours, and are compatible with popular 3rd-party, 3.5-inch NAS enclosures.