In the article “Reliability: Understanding the Critical Factor Behind Disk Storage” (available on the Tom’s Hardware website) you’ll see why hard drive reliability is becoming more crucial than ever before. Global demand for digital storage continues to explode, but there will not be sufficient storage available to meet demand. This creates even greater need for deployed storage to perform as expected.
IDC’s paper “The Digital Universe of Opportunities” paper couldn’t be clearer: In Moore’s Law fashion, the world’s amount of accumulated digital data is doubling every two years. By 2020, our virtual space will reach 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes)—nearly one byte for every star in the physical universe.
Leading industry analysis firm IDC projects staggering data growth over the next five years.
There is some good news: Only 13ZB of that amount will need to be stored. The bad news: The world will have just 6.5ZB of available capacity by then.
Rapid Growth, Diverse Needs Are Key Storage Challenges
From streaming cell phone video to machine-to-machine Internet of Things (IoT) data streams, the need for more storage across every market segment is overwhelming. Consumers increasingly lean toward hybrid strategies, employing both cloud-based storage services as well as more quickly restored direct- and network-attached storage solutions.
Businesses have even more diverse needs. Some data must be secured. Ipaddress An increasing amount must be made available to fast, real-time analysis. And with every passing month, ever more data must find its way into affordable long-term storage that can still make any file available to users within seconds.
Against this backdrop of relentless data growth and increasingly diverse storage applications, solution providers are confronted with one key question: How will you enable your customers to survive in the Digital World of 2020?
Purpose-Built Approach Boosts Drive Reliability, ROI
As applications and markets continue to diversify, it has become clear that a monolithic approach to storage does not optimally meet market needs. The Seagate solution? Tailor drives to more efficiently fit the demands of specific applications and environments, which increases reliability and maximizes ROI.
Deployment of drives into their appropriate environments, combined with stringent product design, results in low annual failure rates (AFR) and high customer satisfaction. To hit AFR objectives, Seagate’s Product Development Process involves at least a year and a half of testing and design refinement in order to yield ultra-reliable hard drives.
