ECN Asia spoke with Hitachi GST’s Shinichi Yamamoto on the trends in hard disk drive technology. Excerpts:
What trends do you see in the HDD industry?
In the past 50 years of HDD’s history, the goal of manufacturers is just simply to increase the capacity of the drives. Today, however, power has become a big factor. Capacity is, of course, still very important because we can reduce the price if we achieve high density of the coding inside the driver. Price reduction is always a priority. Another trend that I see is deploying HDDs in new markets. For example, power savings is a big concern in the consumer electronics segment. End-consumers want green products, so this is a good opportunity for us and we are now designing products with power savings in mind.
How do you see the direction of HDD technology in the future? Will it focus more on energy efficiency, low noise, capacity, or other factors?
I think the focus will be on capacity and power savings. Increasing capacity has always been the goal of HDD suppliers. Because more and more people want to store information, download movies and photos, stream video, etc., the requirement for storage has dramatically increased. According to research firms such as IDC and Gartner, the PC/IT segment will be saturated soon, while devices for the consumer segment such as set-top boxes (STBs) and digital video recorders (DVRs) for surveillance and personal storage are growing approximately 20 to 30 percent annually. These areas present good opportunities for Hitachi. Other HDD suppliers are also eyeing these market opportunities and are working on high density technology and new head or disk technologies. The trend is to increase the total capacity to about 20 to 60 percent every year in 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives.
Another key point is power savings. I recently attended a summit held in Japan and the common concern is how to achieve a 50 percent savings of CO2 by the year 2050. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 40 years, but Hitachi is definitely working hard on producing green products and technologies, including hard drive design. With our new CinemaStar hard drives, we have made a big step in conserving energy.
What is Coosplin technology and what are its benefits?
Coolspin is an optimizing technology. CoolSpin drives use a motor speed optimized for low power and acoustics, enabling Hitachi to deliver the industry’s quietest, most energy-efficient hard drives. The technology enables a new generation of DVRs and set-top boxes that store more hours of video, run more quietly and use less power. The biggest benefit is power savings.
Does having a green hard disk mean losing a little bit on performance?
Yes. For each application, we must decide on the balance of how much performance we need to support the applications and how much power we need to save. If you look at surveillance DVRs or satellite or digital TVs, their transfer rate is slower than that of IT applications.
Are there other areas that you can innovate on to reduce power consumption of HDD in the future?
Probably we can work on a little more on power savings and performance optimization the LSI design area. Slowing the spindle motor speed is not a good way to save power anymore because the head is flying over the disk. By spindling the motor slowly, you can’t get enough air pressure for the head. That will make unstable flight height, so that’s bad for high-density and write operation of the drive. At this moment, I don’t see any other major area we need to work on for power saving because we already achieved a big power savings percentage. For the next two to three years, we can probably only make little improvements. |
