Seagate bigging up disk drives as strategic AI data stores

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Seagate bigging up disk drives as strategic AI data stores
Seagate’s inaugural 2026 Data Infrastructure Readiness Report says AI is transforming storage into strategic business infrastructure.
Which means, for Seagate, and simply put, AI-using organizations should not put all their AI data eggs in one flash basket.
Melyssa Banda, Edge Storage Business SVP at Seagate, said: “AI is reshaping the way organizations plan, build and operate infrastructure. As data volumes grow, so does the value organizations can derive from the data. They need data infrastructure that helps them preserve, access and use more of that data over time. Sustainable Scaling is about making those infrastructure decisions more efficient, more durable and more connected to long-term data value.”
Sustainable Scaling? Seagate says this is “increasing AI capacity and business value while continuously improving the efficiency of the infrastructure that supports it. In practice, that means making infrastructure decisions to scale with rising AI data requirements while improving efficiency, sustainability and long-term data value.”
Well, yes, but in practise really, the infrastructure decisions should include buying more disk storage.
Seagate’s commissioned report says: “Organizations must plan for both more data and more value embedded in that data. A short-term approach focused only on immediate capacity can leave information fragmented, inaccessible or expensive to reuse. A longer-ranging view can connect retention, access and governance decisions to the future value the organization expects AI to create.”
So: “Rather than applying a single architecture across the entire data lifecycle, organizations can design systems that balance performance, capacity, efficiency and long-term value according to workload requirements. This creates a more practical framework for scaling AI while controlling infrastructure costs and resource demands.”
The “single architecture” term means SSDs. The report implies SSDs can’t do it all so buy disk drives to improve efficiency, sustainability and long-term data value.You should be able to access the report from this Seagate web page.
Comment
With SSDs now costing 6.5 times more per terabyte of capacity than disk drives Seagate is knocking at a fairly open door. Most organizations will now be thinking that hot AI data lives on flash, warm data lives on disk and cold data is destined for tape, either on-prem or in the public cloud.

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