IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September 2018 - 48

The Art of Storage

Storage at the 2018
Consumer Electronics Show
By Tom Coughlin

onsumer electronic devices are
enabled by digital storage, whether local or in the cloud. Several
digital-storage device suppliers
showed their storage products at the
2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
In addition, many show representatives
used digital storage to enable their applications, including companies at the media
and analyst events, ShowStoppers and
Digital Experience.
Hard disk drive (HDD) companies
Seagate, Western Digital (WD), and
Toshiba plan to focus on flash-memory-based solid-state drives (SSDs), likely with nonvolatile memory express
(NVMe) interfaces for high-performance enterprise applications. In the
enterprise market, high-capacity HDDs,
7,200 r/min, SATA, or SAS computer
system interface products will provide
high-capacity, low-cost storage. This is
the fastest growing segment for the
HDD industry, and these products
account for nearly 50% of the total
shipping HDD capacity. Such storage
devices store photos and other data in
the cloud.
Toshiba makes several digital storage products, including flash-memorybased SSDs and HDDs. In 2017, it
introduced a 14-TB conventional magnetic recording 3.5-in HDD with nine
disks using conventional magnetic
recording (CMR). After the 2018 CES,
the company also announced that it was
making a 14-TB CMR drive using two-

Toshiba showed its line of
2.5-in HDDs, including its
first 7-mm-thick drives.
read sensor, two-dimensional magnetic
recording. WD has a 14-TB enterprise
HDD that uses shingled magnetic
recording, while Toshiba showed its
line of 2.5-in HDDs, including its first
7-mm-thick drives. For the last two
years, Seagate has had a 7-mm-thick,
2.5-in drive.
In addition to its HDDs, Toshiba
displayed its new RC100 NVMe M.2
SSD, which utilizes Toshiba's 64-layer
3-b/cell BiCS flash memory and an inhouse SSD controller. This small drive
delivers up to 1.6-GB/s read and 1.2-GB/s

FIGURE 1. Toshiba's RC100 NVMe M.2 SSD.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2018.2835938

FIGURE 2. Seagate's external HDDs.

Date of publication: 9 August 2018

48 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

september 2018

write transfer speeds (Figure 1), and it
has storage capacities of up to 480 GB.
The RC100 is intended for mainstream
computing, from gaming desktops and
notebooks to small personal computers.
Seagate exhibited its copilot external
storage product, which was developed in
collaboration with drone-maker DJI.
This is a rugged external storage product
focusing on collecting content from flash
memory cards in the field directly into a
large 2.5-in HDD without using an
external computer; it also displays the
status of the consumer's transferred data.
Seagate, in collaboration with JingDong, displayed a product called Joy
Drive. This product, popular in the Chinese market, includes a battery-powered
external hard drive that provides phone
or tablet charging. Both products offer
universal serial bus (USB)-C USB-A, or
miniUSB interfaces. Seagate introduced
new versions of its LaCie Rugged drives
with hardware encryption and a fast
external SSD product with up to 1-TB
capacity and a native USB-C connector,
as shown in Figure 2.
Seagate displayed its 3.5-in heatassisted magnetic recording drive and a
model of the dual-actuator drive, which

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