Seagate and Western Digital are two of the biggest names in data storage worldwide. Each company has gained market share over the decades through a series of mergers and acquisitions and offer portfolios of high-quality products and services at competitive prices. While the two companies are engaged in a long-running battle for the consumer hard […]
Seagate and Western Digital are two of the biggest names in data storage worldwide. Each company has gained market share over the decades through a series of mergers and acquisitions and offer portfolios of high-quality products and services at competitive prices.
While the two companies are engaged in a long-running battle for the consumer hard drive market, they also compete in the enterprise storage realm — though their offerings are different in significant ways. Let’s look at how the storage providers compare:
See more: The Storage Management Market
Seagate’s portfolio of enterprise data solutions falls under the brand Lyve. Lyve is an edge-to-cloud mass storage platform geared toward businesses with large volumes of unstructured data. The platform is designed to position storage infrastructure at the edge and to work with any cloud vendor or computing ecosystem.
Further, Seagate states that it will not implement egress or access fees to data, eliminating cost barriers that exist in some enterprise storage solutions. Services under the Lyve rubric include:
Seagate also offers enterprise storage drives, such as the X series hard disk drives (HDDs) with up to 20 TB of capacity or the E series HDDs with up to 10 TB. Its Nytro solid-state drives (SSDs) scale up to 3.8 TB for a SATA drive, and 15.3 TB for SAS. Other data storage systems include its Corvault self-healing, self-managed storage devices, and flash, hybrid, and disk arrays.
Western Digital has a more focused approach on which industries the company gears itself toward, such as the automotive sector. The company also manufactures hardware and software solutions to support data centers, edge computing centers, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These offerings include:
Western Digital’s enterprise SSDs scale in capacity up to 8 TB, and their WD Gold enterprise class SATA HDDs can house 20 TB of data each. In addition, the company sells a robust portfolio of data center platforms, from their Ultrastar Edge Ruggedized Edge Server to the more mobile Ultrastar Edge Transportable Server.
See more: Top Trends in Data Storage Management
Both Seagate and Western Digital have their own partner programs.
Seagate Enterprise Partner Program Benefits:
Noteworthy Seagate partners include Costco, Amazon, Newegg, CDW, and Walmart.
Western Digital has several partner programs and is in the process of consolidation. At present, its enterprise program is not accepting new applications. Overall, its programs offer:
Notable Western Digital partners include AMD, Broadcom, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
Early in the pandemic, a film crew partnered with Seagate to implement a solution that would enable film production to proceed in remote, low-bandwidth, low-internet connectivity settings, while still maintaining routine camera backups.
The solution was Lyve Mobile arrays, a seamless storage-as-a-service solution with high-capacity, high-performance data transfers and on-site backups. The filmmakers produced roughly 2 TB per hour of footage, peaking at 12 TB per day. Lyve arrays made on-site backups simple and rapid, and the data was highly portable, able to be transitioned quickly to the off-site editing crew.
Smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider generates obscene amounts of data in literally seconds, with one second of collisions creating one petabyte of data. This information is processed by nearby computer farms, filtered, processed, and sent to a data center.
CERN, the organization involved, was targeting a read/write speed of 12.5 GB per second, theoretically achievable with 48 drives, but the temperature and vibration of the drives posed a challenge.
Western Digital deployed its Ultrastar Data60 Storage Platform, armed with ArcticFlow thermal zone cooling technologies and IsoVibe vibration isolation technology, to keep the whole array running cool and steady.
Each year, storage provider Backblaze publishes statistics on hard drive failure rates. In their analysis for 2021, Seagate’s annualized failure rates are down considerably over the past three years, from a high point of nearly 3% failure in 2019 to its current position of 1.5%.
This data is aggregated from many different hard drives, and some drives have performed better than others. Western Digital Drives have consistently outperformed Seagate in terms of reliability, failing less than .5% of the time for as long as Backblaze has kept track.
Seagate has been recognized as a market leader for enterprise HDDs, receiving several awards from IT Brand Pulse. HPCwire awarded Seagate for providing the “best HPC collaboration between government and industry,” “the best HPC storage product or technology,” and the “top five new technologies to watch.” The company has also received extensive recognition for its diversity initiatives.
Western Digital has been awarded by Forbes as one of America’s top companies and as one of the 100 fastest-growing companies. And its corporate social responsibility, ethical conduct, and diversity initiatives have all received recognition.
The two storage providers have long provided high-quality storage devices for enterprise needs. Their products and services differentiate in many significant ways at the enterprise level.
Through its recently launched Lyve, Seagate is attempting to cut out a space in the storage-as-a-service market, while Western Digital is maintaining its dominance in the manufacturing of storage hardware.
Western Digital is also focusing on IoT devices and the auto sector, developing solutions to problems that have yet to hit the market. Western Digital also distinguishes itself as providing high-reliability, low-failure drives, though Seagate has made significant reductions in its annualized failure rates year over year.
The HDD and SSD markets are highly competitive, with iterative gains being made by all players in the field each year, and performance and reliability are variable between models.
See more: Best Data Storage Solutions and Software
Litton Power is a writer and public affairs consultant. He has an extensive background in science, technology, and the energy sector and was a former science communicator at Idaho National Laboratory. He lives in Tennessee, where he spends his free time hiking, camping, and building furniture.
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