Seagate disclosed recently during its earnings call for Q2 2017 that the company will be prepping for much larger storage capacity HDDs in the coming months. The company also revealed its long-term goal achieving the capabilities to produce 20TB HDDs by 2020.
Seagate will bring a 14TB and 16TB hard drive to market within 18 months
The hard drive manufacturing company already has its 12TB capacity HDDs ready and on the field, while their 14TB and 16TB capacity HDDs are still in the design phase and should be ready in 18 months. This might be difficult for the company to sustain, since HDDs are becoming less appealing to consumers as opposed to HDDS nowadays, thanks to the differences in speed.
These new capacity HDDs are destined for high capacity data centres, NAS, DVRs as well as the new and upcoming surveillance market, which is currently all the rage these days. According to Techno Buffalo, the CEO of Seagate, Steven Luzco confirmed that the company will be launching the new 3.5-inch hard drives that will be popped into the computer as standard fittings. The highest capacity that the company currently sells is 10TB – which sells for a not-so-cheap $429. Meaning that the newer ones will be costing a lot more.
And while these drives run at a speed of 7200rpm, they still won’t be fast enough so users are better off using an SSD to boot their copy of Windows 10. They will still be good for users who don’t really need the performance factor and could use the drives for data dumping.
According to PC Gamer, although Seagate is making developments in their hard drives department, they are focusing on the surveillance department because their HDDs are more optimized with special firmware so that there is always smooth video streaming meant for always-on applications. Seagate made $2.9 billion in revenue during its second quarter for the fiscal year 2017 and a chunk of it came from their hard drive sales alone.
In fact, the company was saving manufacturing costs last year and shut down one of their factories in China and it has saved the company $300 million per year. It will compensate the manufacturing capacity and accommodate them in their other plants by increasing production capacity a little.
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