When I take a step back, I cannot help but notice at how much my life revolves around the “cloud”. One of the first things I do every morning is to turn on my smartphone and see what emails came in overnight. Then, I launch various social media apps to check up on friends, family and daily events. It really is amazing that all of this information is available at the tap of my finger.
What most of us take for granted is where our digital content resides. The majority of the data and information we access daily is stored in the cloud, in huge data centers with rows and rows of storage systems, each of which is loaded with dozens of HDDs. I was like most everyone else until my job responsibilities allowed me to visit and contact some of the largest cloud companies in the world. It was then and there that I finally started to understand the scale of the cloud. And despite doing this job function for several years now, I am still in awe every time I visit or meet one of the cloud companies. The volume of nearline HDDs they purchase is beyond my comprehension. What kind of data fills up all of these HDDs? How could they possibly consume all of those exabytes? It really is overwhelming.
Source: TRENDFOCUS, Inc.*
In CQ3 ’19, over 140 exabytes in nearline HDDs shipped. Of that amount, 14TB HDDs accounted for 36% of all nearline exabytes shipped. And, although Toshiba’s MG07 Enterprise Capacity 14TB HDD is currently our best-selling MG series HDD, cloud companies are already clamoring for upcoming products such as Toshiba’s MG08 Enterprise Capacity 16TB HDD, and our future 18TB.
Since the launch of the industry’s first 9-disk 14TB nearline HDD in late 2017**, Toshiba’s capacity-optimized HDD market share has increased solidly. The growth of this business is the result of the collective efforts of the Toshiba HDD team. Each members’ valuable contribution helped make this program a success, and I am proud to be a part of the team. The new year holds a new set of challenges, but I know as long as we at Toshiba continue to function as one unit, we have a good chance of reaching our goals.
*TRENDFOCUS, Inc. subscriber data reports are published quarterly. Analysis based on CQ3 2019 data report
** World's First Source: Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation, as of December 8, 2017 for the 3.5-inch 26.1mm.
Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft Operating System and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.