17
FEATURE NEWS
its new range of HAMR hard drives, which will begin shipping in huge numbers in 2019 in sizes over 20TB, with 40TB drives on the horizon. And the prediction is that 70% of all data will be stored on hard disks in future, despite the increase in SSDs. HAMR uses a new kind of media coating on each disk that allows data bits to become smaller and more densely packed than ever. A small laser diode attached to each recording head enables data to be written, and only uses a tiny amount of power without generating any increase in heat. “Price of storage has come down a lot. We recently unveiled our HAMR (Heat Assist Magnetic Recording) technology. With this you’ll have a 20TB single drive, and that’s just around the corner. It’s not a $100 situation at first but it will be in the future.”
LEFT Tim Bucher, SVP of Seagate
consumer solutions.
drives are still very important for us as SSDs have penetrated laptops. The capacity has gone down significantly in these laptops, so people buy an external drive for backup or the content they are creating. In future, we will continue to make HDDs and flash, but the key is performance. It’s not one 4K stream anymore, as when you’re editing you might have four 4K streams at the same time. That’s why you need fast transfer via Thunderbolt 3. The spec is 40GB/s but you don’t actually get that. It’s more like 2.8GB/s, which is plenty to stream multiple 4K and 8K streams for editing. It’s not capacity – performance is becoming a more dominant variable.” HUGE SSD But Seagate is also focusing on capacity. It recently showed off a 60TB SSD, heralded as the world’s biggest at the time. And at the NAB show in Las Vegas this year it had 104 SSDs Raided together for a staggering one petabyte of storage. That’s 1024 terabytes. And these aren’t just any SSD drives, but very high-quality ones. Not all drives are created equal, explains Tim. “Flash drives have a finite life but it depends on the quality of the flash. We have Enterprise flash SSDs and we have consumer SSDs. I wouldn’t store my Star Wars movie on a consumer SSD but the Enterprise class ones are fine,” he says. “You are limited to the number of writes on a SSD but that’s been changing quite a bit. We embrace both flash and HDD technologies and you will see more and more of both solutions coming out.” The future will not only be about SSD drives but also a new generation of more advanced and faster HDD hard drives that can handle much more data. The firm recently unveiled
which is why leaks can and have been happening. “These TV and movie data breaches are occurring as people ship large hard drives to colour correction and editing. These are billion-dollar issues for films such as Star Wars – to be able to secure those is really important,” says Tim. “To prevent such breaches we have launched the LaCie Rugged Secure hard drive, which has hardware encryption – you can make sure it is only shared with trusted sources.” So, even if the hard drive unit is disassembled, there will be no way to access the information on it without the passcode. “We will start rolling this out to all our hard drives – Enterprise technology we are bringing to our consumer and creative professional solutions,” says Tim. And for security of your data on location, the new LaCie Rugged Raid Pro has two separate drives inside a Raid formation. So if one of the drives should fail, the other still has a safe copy of your work. In terms of performance, Seagate is now driving forward in its development of ever-faster and reliable SSDs thanks to its recently- announced deal to be part of the group acquiring Toshiba. “We’re going even deeper into the flash business,” says Tim. “Hard
LACIE PLAY IT SAFE
LaCie’s newRugged RAID Pro 4TB not only gives protection against harsh environments thanks to its tough build and rubber coating, but also offers a built-in RAID to protect data due to two separate hard drives inside. It also comes with an integrated SD card reader, and a USB-C connector compatible with Thunderbolt 3 connections and USB 3.0. LaCie is so confident of its products, the RAID Pro 4TB includes a three-year warranty with data recovery services and a one-month Adobe All-Apps plan featuring Adobe Premier Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator CC and more. With speeds of up to 240MB/s in RAID 0 and RAID, the drive will cost £319/$349. LaCie also has the Rugged Secure drive, which allows you to transport your data and keep it protected from unauthorised access via self-encrypted technology. It’s USB-C, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt 3 compatible and costs £139/$139 for a 2TB version. The firmalso launched Collective, an online community bringing together creative professionals to share ideas and hone their skills by collaboratingwith like-minded filmmakers and industry experts. The site hosts a select group of experts who will nurture talent by providing content and feedback during their residency. collective.lacie.com
FLASH DRIVES HAVE A FINITE LIFE BUT IT DEPENDS ON THE QUALITY OF THE FLASH
@DEFINITIONMAGAZINE | @DEFINITIONMAGS | @DEFINITIONMAGS
JULY 2018 DEFINITION
Powered by FlippingBook