(By Observer Net, Lv Dong; Editor: Zhang Guangkai)
Today, China has the capability to manufacture advanced solid-state drives and memory modules, but has yet to overcome the mechanical hard drive, which has a history of several decades?
"Today, there are only three companies in the world that can produce mechanical hard drives, none of which are based in China." Recently, at the 2025 Data Storage Industry Conference, Zhou Yuefeng, Senior Vice President of Huawei, CEO of Cloud, and Head of the Data Storage Product Line, stated directly that China has solved the localization of components such as CPU, memory, and solid-state drives. The only component that has not been localized is the mechanical hard drive, leaving a huge value and market space for China's storage industry.
Looking at its development history, in 1956, IBM in the United States developed the first mechanical hard drive, with a capacity of only 5MB and a weight of over a hundred kilograms, the size equivalent to two refrigerators. Although it was large and cumbersome, it marked the beginning of a new era in the storage industry. In the following decades, mechanical hard drives underwent technological evolution, increasing in capacity and becoming smaller in size. At the same time, fierce market mergers occurred between American, Japanese, and South Korean manufacturers, eventually forming a tripartite situation among Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.
In late 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission of China released data showing that in the third quarter of that year, the global shipment of mechanical hard drives reached 38.39 million units. Among them, Seagate had a market share of 40.9%, Western Digital had 38.2%, and Toshiba had 20.9%, with these three companies dominating the entire mechanical hard drive market. According to Tom Coughlin's statistics, in the first quarter of 2025, the global mechanical hard drive market was still dominated by these three companies, with Western Digital at 42%, Seagate at 40%, and Toshiba at 18%.
Evidently, mechanical hard drives have become the domain of American and Japanese giants, but Chinese enterprises have not made no efforts at all.
In 1999, Great Wall Group launched China's first independently produced mechanical hard drive, with a capacity of 8.6GB, which was a breakthrough in the core components of computers. The next year, after Great Wall Hard Drive was put on the market, monthly sales exceeded 50,000 units. However, due to a lack of core technology, the product frequently encountered quality issues, and Great Wall's market reputation quickly deteriorated, forcing it to shift from independent R&D to contract manufacturing cooperation, introducing IBM production lines and technology.
In 2001, Great Wall Group established the ExcelStor brand through a Sino-foreign joint venture. The company's Jupiter series and Mars series mechanical hard drives attracted market attention. However, because ExcelStor adopted IBM's "high-density glass disc technology," which had serious defects, leading to frequent bad sectors and high repair rates, it not only caused IBM's hard drive business to collapse and be acquired by Hitachi, but also resulted in poor sales of ExcelStor hard drives and a collapse of brand reputation.
From pioneering domestic production in 1999 to completely disappearing from the market in 2007, within just eight years, Great Wall and ExcelStor became a "fleeting moment" in the history of China's mechanical hard drive development, leaving behind the regret that China could not independently produce mechanical hard drives.
But now looking back, China's decision not to persist in mechanical hard drives was also seeing the new trends in the development of the storage industry.
With the emergence of flash memory technology, solid-state drives (SSDs) have almost all advantages in read/write speed and capacity, except for higher costs. For example, PCIe 4.0 solid-state drives can achieve sequential read/write speeds of up to 5000 MB/s, while the average read/write speed of current mechanical hard drives is 60-80 MB per second, with a maximum of up to 500 MB/s, which has already formed a significant gap with SSD speeds.
On this new track, Chinese enterprises have caught up rapidly. As of now, Changjiang Storage's 232-layer 3D flash memory chips have been mass-produced, representing the most advanced level in the industry, and are accelerating the construction of the third phase project. In terms of memory chips, Changxun Memory's latest DDR5 product series has a maximum speed of 8000 Mbps, with the highest chip capacity of 24Gb, reaching international leading levels.
It can be said that Changcun and Changxin's breakthroughs in two core tracks have compensated for China's previous "shame" in the mechanical hard drive track, becoming a representative of China's scientific and technological self-reliance and self-strengthening. With the support of the major fund and local state capital, these two giants are not short of funds or technology, but the only thing they lack is capacity. Once production can catch up, they will surely achieve remarkable results in the storage chip market in the future.
Since the breakthrough in domestic flash memory and memory technology has been achieved, why is the industry still focusing on such an apparently outdated technology as mechanical hard drives?
The answer lies in the considerations of performance and cost in the AI era. We all know that solid-state drives (SSDs) have obvious advantages in read/write speed and system response time, while mechanical hard drives (HDDs) are more competitive in cost and storage capacity. In the era of AI big models, considering both performance and economy is key to efficient big data storage.
"After the arrival of AI, there are two changes in storage. First, the performance of storage devices needs to be very high to match the high-performance parallel computing of AI computing clusters, going towards higher performance. Another is that a massive amount of data needs to be retained, so we have what we call data support. In the second issue, using only flash memory and semiconductor media is unrealistic, as it is too expensive," Zhou Yuefeng told Observer Net.
In his view, China has already become a country with a large volume of data, with annual data generation increasing from the 800EB level. The annual consumption of mechanical hard drives (HDDs) in the Chinese market alone is close to 60 billion yuan. "The absence of this core technology has placed our industry in a passive position in the global supply chain. I believe that storage media should accelerate diversified and balanced development, and break through from materials, manufacturing equipment, and processes," he said.
Currently, in terms of large-capacity storage, mechanical hard drives still offer a higher cost-effectiveness compared to solid-state drives. More importantly, the reliability and lifespan of mechanical hard drives are much higher than those of solid-state drives. For these reasons, mechanical hard drives have not been eliminated, and their technology is still further developing. For example, Toshiba hard drives have increased the capacity of mechanical hard drives to 30TB, while Seagate's MACH.2 hard drive has a maximum read speed of over 500MB/s.
However, although mechanical hard drives have a long development history, they are not a simple technology, but rather a representative of precision manufacturing. From the industrial chain perspective, mechanical hard drive manufacturing involves multiple fields such as precision machinery, materials science, and magnetism. The production line investment is huge and the cycle is long, with the construction of a new production line requiring several years. Key components (magnetic recording medium, voice coil motor, main control chip) rely on a few suppliers, even being monopolized by the US and Japan. This monopoly is not only reflected in market share, but also in technical patents, supply chain control, and equipment export bans, creating comprehensive barriers that make it difficult for external companies to enter.
But for China, not mastering core technologies means losing pricing power, and more importantly, the importance of storage is becoming increasingly prominent in the AI era.
Zhou Yuefeng candidly stated, "AI's brain equals processor plus data storage." "Imagine a person is called smart, he must have two characteristics: one is that his mind moves fast and is very clever, and the second is that he has an excellent memory, he can remember things he has done in history, books he has memorized, even the multiplication table of nine times nine and 19 times 19, so he is smart. A real AI brain must be data storage plus processor. This processor can be a GPU or an NPU. In China's entire IT industry, the phenomenon of emphasizing computing and neglecting storage must change, otherwise China will find it difficult to truly become a major and strong AI country."
Therefore, when talking about topics like mechanical hard drives, he said, "We still need to invest effort in doing this. Whether Huawei Company is investing effort, we definitely are doing this. I think we are full of hope."
Zhou Yuefeng also used data classification management as an example, saying, "In the past, we usually talked about hot, warm, and cold data. We believe that in the AI era, there is no cold data anymore, because data must be accessible at any time, they need to generate knowledge and experience, and serve as a corpus for AI, not just for archiving purposes. In the future, three layers will become two layers, hot data and warm data. If cold data also becomes warm data, the current mechanical hard drive medium that supports warm data may require new forms and more innovative technologies to support the storage of such massive amounts of data at a lower cost and more efficiently. This requires new media and innovations in media to support it."
He also frankly admitted, "Today, in China, from the underlying medium to every component, CPU, and up to the software and operating systems, all have been localized. It can be said that in the broader scope of the IT industry, data storage has the potential to be the first industry to strive for global leadership in the IT industry. Therefore, I also call on more storage vendors and more partners in the IT field to work together, so that data storage can become the second technological card of China, just like 5G, I think we should dare to lead, and it is very promising."
This article is an exclusive article by Observer Net. Without permission, it cannot be reprinted.
Original: toutiao.com/article/7581426473505260047/
Statement: The article represents the personal views of the author.