The storage stories enterprise IT leaders actually read.
Volume 343, Issue 1 · 6 articles from 2 issues
Soaring flash prices revive hybrid storage, and George Crump says success depends on where tiering logic runs.
StorageSwiss analyst George Crump revisits hybrid storage, which lost out a decade ago when opaque array-controller caching algorithms sent busy volumes to slow disk.
Flash and memory prices rose 70-95% in the first half of 2026 as AI buildouts absorbed supply, and enterprise NVMe now costs about $706 per terabyte versus $56 for a 24TB hard drive, roughly 12-14 times more, reopening the hybrid question for refresh cycles.
Crump argues tiering inside the infrastructure software, with cache next to the VM and IT control over placement, can avoid the first generation's failures.
Omdia research shows the 2026 flash and DRAM shortage is forcing IT leaders to rethink storage planning, procurement and data retention.
Omdia analyst Simon Robinson writes that hyperscale and frontier AI buying of flash and DRAM has caused unprecedented shortages and price rises, overturning the long-held assumptions that storage will always be plentiful and prices will always fall.
IT leaders are now revising infrastructure plans and changing how they plan data environments, procure infrastructure and work with suppliers, so they are better prepared next time.
The Omdia study also found that many organizations do not understand the data they store, and that retaining large volumes of dark data has become a major cost and risk.
Backblaze's Q2 2026 Drive Stats shows annualized failure rate rising to 1.73% from 1.24%, as 20TB+ drives top a quarter of its fleet.
Backblaze's Q2 2026 Drive Stats report, now in its 13th year, analyzes more than 350,000 production hard drives and shows the quarterly annualized failure rate rising to 1.73%, the highest in some time and up from 1.24% in Q1, while lifetime AFR edged up to 1.41%.
Three models exceeded the 6.95% outlier threshold, two of them very old and two of them Seagate models with small populations.
Drives of 20TB and larger now make up over a quarter of the fleet, no new models were added for a second quarter, and two long-serving HGST models were fully retired.
AI data centers favor cheap HDD capacity over SSDs, prompting Toshiba's $380M plan to nearly double AI storage drive output by FY2027.
TechRadar Pro reports that AI is giving hard drives a second wind as data centers need huge amounts of affordable storage, with SSDs costing roughly 20 times more per unit of storage.
Toshiba, which holds just over 10% of the HDD market by capacity, will invest about $380 million in its first major expansion in about five years, nearly doubling AI and cloud drive capacity in the Philippines by fiscal 2027.
New lines will produce drives holding up to 40% more data, with 65TB-class drives targeted around 2030 and 100TB later.
Legacy SAN, NAS and HDD storage bottlenecks real-time analytics and AI; flash and NVMe architectures deliver needed low latency.
TechTarget explains that real-time analytics is now strategic for organizations investing in AI, automation and digital twins, and that storage, not just compute, is often the bottleneck.
Traditional SAN, NAS and HDD architectures were built for transactional databases, file sharing, backups and scheduled reports, favoring capacity and reliability over response time.
Flash storage and NVMe-based architectures help enterprises achieve the low latency and high throughput modern workloads demand.
Toshiba will invest about $380M to nearly double nearline HDD capacity at its Philippine plant by FY2027 to chase AI storage demand.
Blocks and Files reports that Toshiba, the third-place HDD maker, will invest about 60 billion yen ($380 million) in its Philippine operations, per Nikkei, marking 30 years of manufacturing there.
The goal is to nearly double the Laguna Technopark plant's annual production capacity, measured in storage capacity, by FY2027 compared with FY2025, as the site that historically made client and specialty drives adds a newly expanded nearline line.
Toshiba's other Philippine sites make enterprise and client SSDs, circuit boards and data center HDDs, including helium-filled nearline drives.