Seagate Unveils Fastest Hard Disk Drive - Analyst Blog

Storage solutions provider, Seagate Technology STX recently announced the launch of its latest Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4, a hard disk drive (HDD) with 6TB (Tera byte) capacity.

This new 3.5 HDD v4 product offers a more flexible, efficient and cost effective solution, which is expected to enhance overall drive capacity, reliability and performance. The new drive not only provides high-capacity storage, but also provides advanced cloud-based solutions to customers, thereby balancing the workload across dynamic data centers and platforms.

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch drive is an exceptionally fast and backward-compatible storage solution. It is also available in 5TB, 4TB and 2TB capacities, thus providing adequate storage. It offers up to 12 Gb/sec SAS or 6 GB/s SATA HDD for faster performance.

Additionally, the 3.5 HDD v4 includes RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) solutions that enable data storage using multiple drives and various data replication strategies to minimize the impact of the failure of any one drive.

The launch of the 3.5 HDD v4 comes at an opportune moment as storage services related to smartphones and tablets are being adopted on a large scale. Cloud-based storage has become the order of the day as it enables users to access content through different gadgets such as smartphones, tablets and personal computers. Seagate is expected to get good mileage from its hard drives that have a lower cost per gigabyte.

Storage of unstructured data has become a major problem. Big Data storage needs to be able to handle capacity and provide low latency for analytics work. According to IDC, growth of unstructured data will drive global digital data to reach 16 Zettabytes (ZB) by 2017. The launch bodes well for Seagate as businesses generate a large amount of data that needs to be stored cost-effectively for future reference.

We believe the secular growth of digital data, modest growth in the total addressable market and higher demand for storage are expected to drive near-term results. Additionally, synergies from acquisitions and product innovations continue to drive growth.

Moreover, Seagate has significant exposure to high-end corporate desktop and enterprise server markets, which will help it to compete with rivals such as Western Digital Corp. WDC, SanDisk Corp. SNDK and Fusion-io in the long run.

Currently, Seagate has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). A better-ranked stock worth considering in the sector is Rambus Inc. RMBS, carrying a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).