Seagate is celebrating the debut shipment of very sophisticated storage solutions to a preferred client (dealing in the cloud data center sector). These 30+ terabyte hard drives are based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology - the American data storage company is setting up its next generation Corvault range with the thermal magnetic recording methodology. The first shipment of HAMR-based drives is reported to consist of final qualification samples, but Seagate is anticipating that fully verified equipment - after trial customers give this new product lineup a thumbs-up - will be generating revenue in the coming weeks.

According to a transcript of a recent Seagate financial meeting conference call, CEO Dave Mosley mentioned a dip in business as well as a costly legal settlement, but expects company fortunes to rise due to client uptake of breakthrough storage technologies: "Beyond this cycle, we remain excited about the long-term opportunities presented by the secular growth of data and the relevance of mass capacity storage as new data-centric applications emerge and more workloads migrate to the cloud. We continue to make strong progress on our industry-leading technology road map, including launching HAMR-based products this quarter, which we believe put us in outstanding longer-term position."

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."

Today, at the NAB 2023 conference, Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in data storage infrastructure solutions, introduced the new Seagate IronWolf Pro 22 TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR)-based hard disk drive (HDD). The company's highest capacity CMR HDD, the new drives deliver market-leading capacity, dependability, and powerful performance for multi-user workloads and enterprise RAID solutions

Optimised with Seagate's AgileArray technology, the new Seagate IronWolf Pro 22 TB HDD provides exceptional network-attached-storage (NAS), direct-attached-storage (DAS) performance and RAID reliability in multi-bay and multi-user environments. With user workload rates of 550 TB/year, the IronWolf Pro 22 TB HDD enables commercial and enterprise NAS users to seamlessly store, share, and collaborate on large amounts of data over a network. It also offers an SDR of up to 285 MB/s so users can seamlessly share files, back up, and tackle heavy workloads in multi-user NAS environments. With built-in rotational vibration (RV) sensors to provide RV mitigation, the HDD consistently delivers high performance and reliability in multi-bay systems.

Today, Star Wars fans can choose to represent their side of the Force with the new collectible Seagate Solid State Drives (SSD) inspired by iconic characters of the Star Wars galaxy. Featuring interchangeable faceplate designs honouring Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker, the latest additions to the company's line of licensed special edition storage devices bring PCIe Gen 4 speeds, peak performance, and customisation to the battle stations of Star Wars collectors and tech enthusiasts.

Officially licensed by Lucasfilm, the special edition FireCuda NVMe SSD represents the famed characters with three iconic Lightsaber designs built on swappable heatsink faceplates so gamers can choose a design inspired by the Jedi or Sith that fits their collection at any moment. The drive includes customisable RGB LED lighting that shines through the faceplate to bring a galaxy of atmosphere to battle stations. The unique loading mechanism that attaches the interchangeable faceplates to the SSD and the heatsink were engineered and developed by EKWB. The integrated passive heatsink minimises thermal throttling and maintains peak performance for longer periods of time.

It appears that Western Digital is readying its own line of Xbox Series X|S Storage Expansion cards, and undercutting its big rival - Seagate - in a currently exclusive storage solution market. Word spread across several gaming communities over the past weekend about a new listing on Best Buy, now removed as of late April 2, for a 1 TB capacity WD_BLACK C50 Expansion Card with an asking price of $179.99. WD has offered official external storage solutions for the current generation of Xbox home games consoles, under its WD_BLACK range, but Microsoft granted exclusive manufacturing rights to Seagate for the proprietary Xbox Series X|S storage expansion card system. According to official site information and documentation, these expansion cards are effective in "delivering additional external memory while maintaining the same peak speed and performance as the console's internal SSD".

The Seagate range could have been a timed exclusive, and based on the now deleted Best Buy listing, Microsoft seems to have handed a license to WD. The 1 TB WD_BLACK C50 Expansion Card's pricing was a big talking point, due to it being substantially cheaper than the equivalent capacity Seagate model ($219.99) - a saving of forty dollars, which is an encouraging sign for gamers who have long complained that the Xbox proprietary expansion card offers bad value for money. Seagate's current crop of cards start at $139.99 (512 GB) and go up to $399.99 (2 TB).

Seagate Technology and Seagate Federal, Inc. (dba. Seagate Government Solutions) and Los Alamos National Laboratory signed a cooperative research and development agreement to jointly explore developing efficient computing near storage, especially in settings where erasure encoding is needed for data protection. The overarching goal is to improve the sustainability of compute and storage architectures.

Seagate and Los Alamos are collaborating on a proof-of-concept high-performance compute architecture that provides optimized computing capabilities across and within storage devices. The architecture allows for computing functions to be pushed down into an erasure-encoded hard drive tier. The architecture will allow for faster, more efficient, less energy-intensive and less thermally demanding data retrieval.

Pure Storage, a maker of various storage solutions and custom enterprise-grade SSDs, claims the company will produce SSDs with up to 300 TBs of capacity by 2026. In an interview with Pure Storage CTO Alex McMullan, Blocks & Files got exclusive information that the company targets SSD capacities of up to 300 TBs in 2026. Pure Storage creates proprietary Direct Flash Modules (DFM) SSDs which use 3D NAND chips controlled by a custom SSD controller, are used in the FlashArray systems, and run on a custom FlashBlade operating system. This level of customization allows Pure Storage to create SSD drives with remarkable capacities in the future as the 3D NAND technology advances.

In the coming years, 3D NAND flash manufacturers will switch from the current 200-layer chips to the 400/500-layer chips, driving storage density to new highs. As manufacturers update their technology, so does Pure with its DFM cards that use regular U.2 NVMe connectors in a custom ruler-style format made explicitly for Pure FlashArray systems. Compared to upcoming HDDs that Toshiba and Seagate will use, Pure Storage DFM SSDs will have much higher capacities and read/write speeds, especially as higher-density 3D NAND arrives. You can see the comparison of Pure's estimates for the future 300 TB SSDs with future HDD technology.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX) today reported financial results for its fiscal second quarter ended December 30, 2022. "Seagate is effectively managing through a tough macroeconomic environment. In the December quarter, we delivered revenue and non-GAAP EPS slightly above our guidance midpoint and extended a decade long trend of generating positive free cash flow," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer. "We are executing our industry leading product roadmap, which positions us well as the markets ultimately recover. We expect to launch our 30-plus terabyte HAMR-based product family in the June quarter enabled by 3-plus terabyte per disk densities."

During the fiscal second quarter the Company generated $251 million in cash flow from operations and $172 million in free cash flow, and paid cash dividends of $145 million. The Company reduced debt by $220 million, exiting the fiscal second quarter with total debt of $6.0 billion, and cash and cash equivalents of $770 million. There were 206 million ordinary shares issued and outstanding as of the end of the quarter.

Here's one of the first pictures of a mechanical HDD with NVMe interface. Seagate is apparently in production of an Exos-series Enterprise HDD featuring U.2 NVMe interface where one would expect SAS 12 Gbps. We seriously doubt if the HDD is fast enough to take advantage of U.2 NVMe (at least 32 Gbps per direction), but the move to NVMe probably has to do with the decline of older interface standards such as SAS 12 Gbps and SATA 6 Gbps in the enterprise space for cold-storage, and that future generations of rackmount DAS and NAS enclosures could increasingly feature U.2 backplanes, phasing out SAS and SATA. This is like when optical drives switched over to SATA despite not needing the bandwidth SATA had to offer (optical discs barely move a few dozen MB/s, for which even ATA33 IDE was sufficient). We don't know how the Seagate Exos drive handles NVMe internally—whether there is a new native NVMe controller, or whether this is really just a SAS 12 Gbps drive with a PCIe-to-SAS bridge chip.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, announced that its latest flagship enterprise PCIe 4.0 X1 SSD solution, which was developed in partnership with Seagate was awarded the 2023 Taiwan Excellence Award. "We are very pleased that Phison's enterprise PCIe 4.0 X1 SSD solution has received this honor," said K.S. Pua, CEO or Phison. "For Taiwanese products, the mark of Taiwan Excellence is associated with innovative values that are renowned in the international market for excellence and quality."

The Taiwan Excellence Awards were established by the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Taiwan in 1993. Every year, eligible candidates are subjected to a rigorous and stringent selection system that covers four major aspects of R&D, Design, Quality, and Marketing to identify outstanding products that offer "Innovative Value" while satisfying the key criterion of being "made in Taiwan." Products that have been selected for the Taiwan Excellence Awards will serve as domestic industry examples while being promoted by the government in the international market to shape the creative image for Taiwanese businesses.

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.

Mythical landscapes and fearsome Norse gods and monsters lay in wait as Kratos and Atreus explore the Nine Realms in the highly anticipated God of War Ragnarök, coming this November. The follow up to PlayStation's critically acclaimed God of War title is certain to capture the imagination and excitement of gamers, and it has inspired Seagate to offer a new special edition external hard disk drive (HDD) Game Drive featuring one-of-a-kind artwork inspired by the game.

Adding to Seagate's expanding line of PlayStation storage for gamers, the new officially licensed Seagate special edition God of War Ragnarök Game Drive for PlayStation 5 (PS5) and PlayStation 4 (PS4) consoles features a stunning design based on the title and customizable LED RGB light. The external 2 TB HDD expands storage capacity letting players spend less time managing console storage and more time gaming.

Seagate announces three all-new external hard disk drives (HDD) featuring designs inspired by the stories and characters of Marvel Studios' Black Panther. The officially licensed HHDs are available this month and join the company's line of special edition storage devices. Paying homage to T'Challa (aka Black Panther), Shuri, and Okoye, these special edition HDDs deliver one-of-a-kind pieces of Marvel artwork to fans and highlight traits of the characters with customizable RGB LED lighting: magenta to honor Black Panther, cyan for the innovative style of Princess Shuri, and yellow for the elite strength of the warrior, Okoye.

With up to 2 TB of capacity, the FireCuda external HDDs are compatible with PC, Mac, PlayStation, and Xbox so tech enthusiasts can capture and access a wealth of media, files, and games, regardless of operating system. USB bus-powered and designed with USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection for universal compatibility and quick transfer speeds, the lightweight drives make it easy for Black Panther fans to take their whole library on the road.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX) (the "Company" or "Seagate") today reported financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended September 30, 2022. "Global economic uncertainties and broad-based customer inventory corrections worsened in the latter stages of the September quarter, and these dynamics are reflected in both near-term industry demand and Seagate's financial performance. We have taken quick and decisive actions to respond to current market conditions and enhance long-term profitability, including adjusting our production output and annual capital expenditure plans, and announcing a restructuring plan that will deliver meaningful cost savings while maintaining investments in the mass capacity solutions driving our future growth," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

"We continue to meet our development milestones for the 30+ terabyte product family, which is based on industry leading HAMR technology. Our team is executing well on our innovation roadmap, and we are seeing strong engagement from cloud customers. Looking beyond the current macro uncertainties, we are confident in the secular demand for mass capacity storage driven by the underlying growth in data and believe Seagate is in a great position to capture growth opportunities over the long-term."

Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, today announced its next-generation Exos X systems, the advanced storage arrays powered by Seagate's sixth generation controller architecture. The new Exos X systems feature up to twice the performance of the previous generation and enhanced enterprise-class durability. To help protect the stored data, Exos X systems incorporate ADAPT (Advanced Distributed Autonomic Protection Technology) erasure coding solution with Seagate's innovative self-healing storage technology ADR (Autonomous Drive Regeneration).

The Exos X series is a family of petabyte-scale, rack-mounted block storage enclosures that aggregate and virtualize dozens to hundreds of hard drives and SSDs for maximum data resiliency, availability and performance. Exos X systems are ideal as highly available enterprise storage infrastructure for conventional enterprise data centers as well as private clouds.

LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology Holdings plc, today announced the latest evolution of its popular mobile HDD storage line - LaCie Mobile Drive and LaCie Mobile Drive Secure. Trusted by design enthusiasts and creative professionals since its inception, LaCie consistently delivers iconic storage solutions in which form and function fuse into holistically enjoyable user experience.

LaCie Mobile Drive lives up to its LaCie pedigree with a design and construction built to last. Encased in an all-new innovative design by Neil Poulton, each drive features sturdy aluminium to bring strength to the enclosure. This new generation of LaCie drives includes important sustainability improvements by using post-consumer recycled (PCR) aluminium and plastic. Packaging in the box is also made from recycled cardboard.

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX) (the "Company" or "Seagate"), a world leader in data storage and infrastructure solutions, today announced that it is lowering its business outlook for the fiscal first quarter ending September 30, 2022, against a worsening macro-economic backdrop. Seagate now expects fiscal first quarter revenue of $2.1 billion plus or minus $100 million, which compares to the Company's previous guidance range of $2.5 billion plus or minus $150 million.

"Since our earnings call in mid-July, weaker economic trends in certain Asian regions have amplified customer inventory corrections and supply chain disruptions. We have also seen more cautious buying behavior among global Enterprise / OEM and certain U.S. cloud customers amid ongoing macro-economic uncertainties. These external factors are impacting near-term mass capacity demand while continuing to weigh on the consumer centric legacy markets," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

With the great power of the hard drive comes the great responsibility to securely store and quickly access data. Inspired by the world of Marvel's Spider-Man, Seagate Technology plc today introduced three all-new officially licensed Marvel limited-edition Spider-Man external hard disk drive (HDD) designs joining the company's line of special edition storage devices.

Commemorating Spider-Man, Ghost-Spider (aka Gwen Stacy), and Miles Morales, these special edition HDDs deliver the Spider-Man fan an opportunity to own three unique drives featuring one-of-a-kind Marvel artwork. Each drive also features customizable RGB LED lighting, making it the ultimate accessory to Spidey-themed or other gaming set ups.

Today, Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, announced two additions to its Nytro portfolio, the Nytro 5550 SSD and Nytro 5350 SSD. Engineered with Phison technology for high performance, efficiency, and increased storage density in data centers, the new products comprise the Seagate Nytro 5050 NVMe SSD series. Designed to offer more computing with less energy consumption, they provide a cost-effective solution that eliminates bottlenecks, improves quality of service (QoS), and delivers the highest levels of data integrity and security for business applications.

The Nytro 5350 PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD doubles the read throughput of the latest SAS SSDs, achieving over ten times the bandwidth of SATA to significantly improve QoS. Designed to give data centers more computing power while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), the drive removes data bottlenecks with blistering up to 7.4 GB/s bandwidth and up to 195K IOPS random write speeds and up to 1.7M IOPS random read speeds to provide consistent response times. Perfectly tuned to increase density and boost capacity in ultra-dense environments, Nytro 5350 brings up to 15.36 TB in a 15 mm form factor and up to 7.68 TB in a 7 mm form factor with dual ports, supporting both U.2 and U.3 interfaces for active-active high availability. Designed to take on enterprise workloads, Nytro 5350 delivers 1 DWPD at 2.5M MTBF for enhanced endurance.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today announced the launch of its X1 controller based solid state drive (SSD) platform that delivers the industry's most advanced enterprise SSD solution. Engineered with Phison's technology to meet the evolving demands of faster and smarter global data-center infrastructures, the X1 SSD platform was designed in partnership with Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions. The X1 SSD customizable platform offers more computing with less energy consumption. With a cost-effective solution that eliminates bottlenecks and improves quality of service, the X1 offers more than a 30 percent increase in data reads than existing market competitors for the same power used.

"We combined Seagate's proprietary data management and customer integration capabilities with Phison's cutting-edge technology to create highly customized SSDs that meet the ever-evolving needs of the enterprise storage market," said Sai Varanasi, senior vice president of product and business marketing at Seagate Technology. "Seagate is excited to partner with Phison on developing advanced SSD technology to provide the industry with increased density, higher performance and power efficiency for all mass capacity storage providers."

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX) (the "Company" or "Seagate") today reported financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended July 1, 2022. "Our June quarter results reflect stable mass capacity storage demand, offset by the impacts of Covid restrictive measures in Asia and weakening global economic conditions on our other end markets. These impacts were most pronounced in our consumer facing Legacy markets," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

"The confluence of macro-related challenges is continuing into the September quarter. In this environment, we are reducing our production plans to maintain supply discipline as our customers manage through macro uncertainty and on-going non-HDD component shortages, and we are diligently managing expenses to protect profitability. Looking further ahead, I remain confident that the multiple secular growth trends fueling demand for data and mass capacity storage solutions remain intact. Seagate is well positioned for macro recovery with a strong product roadmap, deep customer relationships and proven track record for disciplined execution."

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."

Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX) (the "Company" or "Seagate") today reported financial results for its fiscal third quarter ended April 1, 2022. "Seagate's March quarter financial results were consistent with our revised outlook, with record nearline product revenue driven by cloud customers partially offsetting multiple macro related headwinds that impacted other end markets, particularly video and image applications, and pressured profitability," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's chief executive officer.

"Our focus is on mitigating these external challenges through ongoing expense discipline, new pricing strategies and operational efficiencies. We are also continuing to execute our strong product roadmap to address customer demand for cost-efficient, mass capacity solutions. In the March quarter, we began the volume ramp of our 20-plus terabyte products, which, combined with continued healthy cloud demand, support our outlook for double-digit fiscal year revenue growth."