HDD manufacturers team up to form the Storage Products Association

Flash Memory Summit 2013 - Mechanical data storage may be getting somewhat overlooked these days in favor of the faster, more energy-efficient SSDs that are flooding the consumer and enterprise markets, but as one would expect, the major hard drive manufacturers have taken notice. Announced this week at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital have all teamed up to form the Storage Products Association (SPA).

"HDDs are a crucial technology for storing the ever expanding data that humans and our machines are generating," said Tom Coughlin, president of storage industry analyst firm Coughlin Associates. "Hard disk drives combined with flash memory can provide users the speed they need while providing affordable mass storage. With continued development of advanced storage technology and storage architectures these amazing storage devices will provide a home for the world's accessible data and serve every type of content users for many years to come."

"We have seen the demand for storage products shift dramatically over the last ten years with the emergence of cloud computing, Internet search, social networks, big data and mobile computing," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of marketing, HGST, and member of the SPA board of directors. "This period of remarkable change is driving the need for innovative and reliable high-performance and high-capacity storage with the best TCO, especially in the areas of hyperscale cloud datacenter infrastructures and cold storage environments. As storage companies, SPA members are at the forefront of this change, focused on evolving products to support changing market needs."

The Association says that the SPA will serve as a new voice for the storage industry, which will help promote the importance of the mechanical hard disk drive and technology that is now over 60 years old. The Association says that one of the most pressing needs at the moment is to inform customers about how hard drive technology and solid state technology can be combined to efficiently scale up mass storage for the consumer and enterprise markets.