Seagate is rolling out an AI platform to cut back prices and time spent on manufacturing onerous drives. With a lot of the manufacturing course of kitted up with sensors already, Seagate is hoping to feed all that information into an AI system offered by Nvidia to maintain HDD manufacturing alive within the age of SSDs.
Most of Seagate’s HDD merchandise are made in-house at varied factories worldwide, and there are reportedly some 1,000 processes mandatory within the manufacturing of spinning platters. With giant quantities of knowledge from sensors throughout its manufacturing line already, Seagate is planning to add that into its cloud computing platform for evaluation. Enter: Project Athena: a joint enterprise by Seagate, HPE, and Nvidia. For the report, it has nothing to do with Intel’s Project Athena.
The system has already been given its first real-world take a look at on the firm’s Normandale wafer fabrication facility, DigiTimes studies. Project Athena has been amassing a number of million microscopic photos of magnetic heads on the plant every day to for high quality assurance, affording Seagate the flexibility to chop clear room prices by 20% and time spent manufacturing by 10%.
Graphics card firm – or ought to I say the “datacentre computing company” – Nvidia has been contracted to provide an AI up for the duty of streamlining Seagate’s HDD manufacturing.
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Jen-Hsun Huang’s firm has been pivoting in the direction of a number one position within the rising AI and accelerated machine studying market lately, touting its skill to reinforce analysis and operation in a wide range of fields, together with: prosthetics, robotics, astronomy, healthcare, and autonomous automobiles.
In a world of stable state drives, minimising manufacturing prices for HDDs is extra essential than ever. These drives exist to fulfil the cost-effective, mass storage market, and with NAND flash costs on the decline, HDD producers are certain to be feeling the squeeze from cheaper, high-performance flash storage. During 2017 Seagate closed one in every of its largest factories.
But Seagate has a secret weapon to drastically improve the storage capability of onerous drives: HAMR. Its hope is that this expertise will make for cheaper drives for the world’s datacentre sector, which is rising at a speedy tempo. The IDC (International Data Corporation) studies that the globe will produce 10x the quantity of knowledge produced in 2017 by the 12 months 2025.
But players are shifting in the direction of a lot speedier pastures. Even SATA stable state drives are making means for sooner NVMe PCIe fashions – that are set to take 50% of the market by the top of 2019.
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