This is the first CES® that I have attended in three years, and it felt good. The attendance for this year’s event was projected to top 100,000, which would be up around 120% from 2022. And although this is still lower than in previous years, it was nice to be back to feel the buzz this show generates. Scattered amongst several Convention Centers and nine hotels, this year’s CES featured approximately 4,500 exhibitors of which over 1,000 are new for this year. There is no show exactly like this one in the world, plus it doesn’t hurt that the show was held in Las Vegas, a city that never sleeps.
I spent most of my time in our company suite meeting customers and to showcase our latest products. This year, most of the focus was on our newest Nearline HDD MG10 series. The MG-10 is a 20TB¹ helium-sealed HDD— leveraging Toshiba’s innovative Flux Control Microwave Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR) technology, spinning at 7,200rpm and delivering 500TB per year workload–which is available in both SATA and SAS interfaces. To put 20TB capacity into perspective, this single HDD can store approximately 40 million photos*, 1.3 billion email pages, or 13.6 billion text pages.
Data generation continues to skyrocket, and storing all of the world’s digital content is a massive undertaking for cloud companies. This means super high-capacity HDDs are extremely popular. As Ed Burns, (HDD) Research Director of IDC stated, “Toshiba’s 20TB MG-10 series is well positioned, as demand for 20TB+ HDDs will continue to be a critical part of the cloud market over the next couple of years.”
As for missing CES®…
Did I miss the long taxi lines? No
Did I miss the overcrowded restaurants? No
Did I miss the long meeting days and evenings? No
Did I miss the long nights catching up on emails? No
However, I did miss our customers and the face-to-face meetings, since there is nothing that can ever replace the personal interactions. It was great to have attended CES® this year and to (almost) feel normal again.
1 One Gigabyte (1GB) means 109 = 1,000,000,000 bytes and One Terabyte (1TB) means 1012 = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes using powers of 10. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 240 = 1,099,511,627,776 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 and other factors.
*Average file size: photo (500MB)
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