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

IEEE Engineering Milestones Celebrate Global Technical History

2 days ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Continual advances in technology drive much of the world’s economy. These include more recent developments such as the wide-spread implementation of AI. But there is a long history of technical innovations that have changed our world. In order to recognize this history of innovation and to encourage the continual advances in technologies that serve humanity IEEE runs an active IEEE Technical Milestone program.
Nvidia Dynamo And Storage Next Boost AI Storage, Performance And Lowers Costs

1 week ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

At the 2025 Nvidia GPU Technology Conference the company announced its AI Data Platform that included significant advances in enterprise digital storage to support corporate AI workloads. However, the company’s KV cache in its Dynamo software and future looking efforts to connect storage and memory more directly with GPUs will drive digital storage and memory demand further, improve inference performance and lower AI costs.
Has The Time Arrived For NVMe HDDs?

1 week ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

During the 2025 Nvidia GTC Seagate was showing NVMe prototype hard disk drives in conjunction with Nvidia. While we shouldn’t expect that NVMe HDDs will dominate the market right away, I think there are reasons to think their time is coming soon! Let’s take a look at the history of NVMe HDDs, the 2025 demonstration and discuss why NVMe makes sense as an HDD storage interface that will enable future HDD innovation.
C1Q 2025 HDD Industry Update

1 week ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

Data is in for the first calendar quarter 2025 HDD industry from the May 2025 Digital Storage Technology Newsletter. Total HDD shipments in C1Q 2025 were down about 9.5% compared with C4Q 2024 (28.7M versus 31.7M). Total exabytes shipped in C1Q 2025 were down about 4.4% from C4Q 2024. HDD revenues (estimated at $5.2B) were down about 8.4% from the prior quarter. This quarter saw a correction to the upward trend in exabyte shipments as well as revenues, that started four quarters ago.
Japan Visits: NARO, IEEE Honors Event, Osaka Expo & Electric Fish Finder

2 weeks ago | forbes.com | Thomas Coughlin

I just spent a busy week in Japan for the IEEE. During this week I visited the area around Kuramoto in Kyushu Island, Japan, where Matt Frances, Director of IEEE Region 5, and I visited a silk factory and a research and development station for the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, NARO. I then flew to Tokyo to attend the first IEEE Young Professionals and Laurates Program and VICS and the IEEE Awards Ceremony, which included awarding the first IEEE Medal of Honor with a purse of $2M.
WDC, Microsoft And Material Recyclers Recover Rare Earths From HDDs

3 weeks 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

3 weeks 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

4 weeks 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?

1 month 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

1 month 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.