Four hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers have announced the launch of the Storage Products Association (SPA), that should focus on the promotion of SSHDs and HDDs. Toshiba, Western Digital, HGST and Seagate are the founding members of the new organisation. SPA states that it has the goal to educate storage vendors, solution providers and users about the role of HDDs and Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) in consumer and business environments.
All four companies are currently heavily investing in Solid State Disks (SSDs) but they believe that HDDs continue to be an important storage medium. "Driven by continued, rapid expansion of digital content production, demand for storage is expected to grow in the mid-30s percent range annually through 2020," said Tim Leyden, president of Western Digital. "While, in that timeframe, a mix of technologies will be deployed to appropriately serve customers, about 75 percent of the capacity is still expected to be rotating magnetic storage devices", he added.
Where SSDs mainly have the disadvantage of being expensive , SSHDs and HDDs are relatively cheap. But they have drawbacks of lower performance and higher power consumption. The organisation wants to educate the world on what the best storage mix is for them."The market for storage continues to grow at an explosive rate with estimates now predicting that by 2020 demand will reach 6 zettabytes annually,” said Jeff, Seagate vice president of strategic marketing and research. "We are pleased to join SPA as we view the association as an excellent forum for educating the public at large".
In 2010 Hitachi, Seagate and WD formed the Storage Technology Alliance that was founded to jointly conduct research and define a road map for hard disk drive technology. However a quick Google search reveals that besides the initial press release no more information was released by them.
The SPA announcement was made on the Flash Memory Summit 2013 that's currently held in the Santa Clara Convention center. Members of the SPA all did presentations on flash memory conference of which you can find the slides here.
