Thomas Coughlin

San Jose

Contributor at Forbes

Digital Storage and Applications Analyst and Consultant 2023 IEEE President-Elect Candidate https://t.co/3I52v1V1f8

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Articles

WDC, Microsoft And Material Recyclers Recover Rare Earths From HDDs

3 days ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Hard disk drives contain valuable materials that are used in their construction and operation. This includes rare-earth magnetics that are used in the rotary actuator that allows the heads to write and read information from tracks of data on the disk surfaces. The rare earth elements used in HDDs include Neodymium, Praseodymium and Dysprosium, used because of their unique magnetic properties.
Digital Storage And Memory Impact Of USA Tariffs

1 week ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

With the ever-evolving trade war and tariffs that likely include digital storage and memory products as well as other electronics it seemed like a good idea to point out that most of the worlds digital storage and memory products are made outside of the USA. Let’s look at the numbers. Digital storage and memory are where the data lives that will fuel the growth of AI training and applications and drive the growth of data centers.
Seagate Survey And Report Shows How To Create Green Data Centers

1 week ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Seagate commissioned a survey and report based upon that survey on the role that digital storage can play in creating more sustainable and efficient data centers. This is particularly important as data centers scale up and new data centers are built to support AI-related businesses. The survey gathered responses from 330 data center professionals across 11 markets: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, North America, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
How Will DOGE Save $1M Per Year By Converting From Magnetic Tape?

2 weeks ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

An April 4 US DOGE social post announced that “The USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 year old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.“ While this social media post doesn’t define the technology used to create permanent modern digital records, it may be useful to discuss what digital storage technologies are currently being used for permanent digital storage and what are common practices for storing data in large...
March 31 Is World Backup Day

3 weeks ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

My first World Backup Day article for forbes.com was in 2014. At that time, I said that, “A few years ago, several companies and folks concerned with data protection updated this idea as a one-day World Backup Day on March 31 of each year.” April 1 is often called April Fool’s Day.
Storage And Memory Enable Next Generation AI At The 2025 GTC

1 month ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia gave one of this announcement-filled presentations at the 2025 GTC in San Jose. Among announcements on GPU roadmaps, low power photonics networking, compact liquid cooled GPU systems, new robotics initiatives and the wide variety of CUDA libraries available to users, he also gave some interesting insights on digital storage and memory requirements for next generation GPUs and changes in AI storage platforms.
Kioxia And Pliops Storage Announcements For The 2025 NVIDIA GTC

1 month ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Digital storage and memory hold the data used to power AI training and for storing the models used in inference. At next week’s NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) several storage and memory companies will be showing their latest products and services to support the growing workloads to enable AI. This article will talk about a couple of these developments from pre-event announcements by Kioxia and Pliops. We will have more to say on digital storage and memory developments when the GTC begins.
C4Q 2024 HDD Industry Update

1 month ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

This data is in for the C4Q 2024 HDD shipments from the February 2025 Digital Storage Technology Newsletter. Total HDD shipments in C4Q 2024 were down about 1.3% compared with C2Q 2024 (31.7M versus 32.1M). Total exabytes shipped in C4Q 2024 were up about 7.2% from C3Q 2024, driven by greater sales of mass storage HDDs, such as nearline drives. HDD revenues (estimated at $5.7B) were up about 8.6% from the prior quarter.
Recent Missions Enable Lunar Data Centers And Human Archives

1 month ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Space-based and moon-based data centers are being created to support earth and outer space data processing requirements and to provide new data disaster recovery capabilities. Storing data on the Moon or even in near earth orbit has interest to governments, NGOs and commercial enterprises. Data storage in outer space provides an additional layer of data security against natural disasters, social upheavals and other threats to data integrity and longevity.
New SanDisk Boosts Data Storage Capacity & Bigger QLC Data Center SSD

2 months ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

SanDisk will be a separate company again, split off from Western Digital likely before the end of February. At an investor day event executives from the new company gave a report on what to expect. The chart below shows historical trends and expectations for growth in storage capacity of NAND flash. Although AI smartphones and edge inference show 20% CAGR, generative AI and LLM training account for 29% CAGR.