Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. The $/GB metric for SSDs (particularly with QLC in the picture) is showing a downward trend, but it is still not low enough to match HDDs in that market segment.

In terms of new product introductions since the release of the last HDD guide, we have retail availability of Toshibas 16TB N300 and X300 drives. The 18TB drives using FC-MAMR are also scheduled to make a retail appearance later this year. Seagate had launched the Ironwolf Pro and Exos 18TB drives last year, and no new capacity updates have been announced for this season yet. The same is the case with Western Digital - The 16TB and 18TB WD Red Pro models were introduced last September. The company did make the OptiNAND announcement in August 2021 - promising the integration of UFS storage in their 20TB+ HDDs in order to improve performance and reliability. With the HDD supply chain seeing some improvements, prices have largely stabilized.