Mankind is on a quest to digitise the world. The global datasphere—a measure of how much new data is created and replicated each year—will grow by more than five times over the next seven years. The total amount of new data created in 2025 is forecast to reach 175 zettabytes (ZB) from 33 zettabytes in 2018. Industries such as financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and media and entertainment are helping to define this new era of data growth.
First, how big is 175 ZB? Well, 1 ZB is equal to 1,000,000,000 GB (1 trillion GB). And, if 175 ZB was stored on a pile of Blu-ray discs, the stack would reach the moon. “The scale of growth of data is unprecedented and staggering,” says BS Teh, senior vice-president, global sales and sales operation, Seagate Technology, a leading data and storage company. Second, the company’s two new-age storage technologies—Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Multi Actuator Technology (MACH.2)—have also moved closer to the market. Rise of Asia Pacific“The Asia Pacific region is one of the fastest growing datasphere regions,” says Teh. “The APJ region, excluding China, is growing at a 2018-2025 CAGR of 28.3% compared with a worldwide rate of 27.2% and a US growth rate of 23.6% over the same time period. Data created in APJ (excluding China) region will increase from 5.9 ZB in 2018 to 33.8 ZB in 2025 (18.2% and 19.3% of the global datasphere, respectively).
While much of the growth will be driven by video surveillance, signals from IoT devices, and metadata (like other regions), entertainment-related data is growing at a faster rate than most other regions, expanding at a rate of 23% compared with a global average of 20% for 2018-2025. IDC research also shows that the number of online users participating in entertainment-related activities is growing faster than the global average – 7.2% compared with 4.6% for 2017-2022. The demand for connectivity and online content will compel enterprises and governments to invest in traditional enterprise and cloud infrastructure.
Although not all of this data created will require permanent storage, storage utilisation in Asia Pacific will grow from 0.5ZB in 2018 to 2.3ZB in 2025. By 2025, 58% of data storage will take place in the public cloud compared with 22% in 2018. One of the growth drivers influencing public cloud usage is that, as a region, Asia Pacific countries have the fastest-growing number of internet users (growing 5.9% on average), which drives use of the cloud not only by users but also by enterprises. India comes centre stage“We are witnessing the emergence of new market segments such as IoT, Big Data, safety and security and surveillance markets – all these are big drivers of storage,” says Teh. Specific to India, surveillance is one of the key growth drivers for Seagate. “This growth has created a massive demand for our storage solutions in India. Additionally, there are projects such as Digital India, Central and state government e-governance initiatives, there is still a fast-growing PC market there. A lot of data is being generated and you need to store it somewhere, and that’s a big growth driver for us.” Innovating for tomorrowMeanwhile, Seagate’s R&D folks have developed HAMR to address the next stage in higher capacities. HAMR addresses the limitations of current PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology, where there is the tendency of smaller magnetised areas to flip their magnetic polarity, and hence their binary bit value, through temperature changes and interference from neighbouring bits.
“HAMR uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits, or grants, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining stable,” says Jeffrey Nygaard, executive vice-president and head of operations, products and technology, Seagate Technology. Seagate is on track to grow beyond 20TB per drive in 2020.
The other Seagate innovation, MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. It will equip hard drives with dual actuators. Each actuator will control half of the drive’s arms – half the drive’s recording heads will operate together as a unit, while the other half will operate independently as a separate unit.

Source: financialexpress.com