Seagate

For over 40 years as a trailblazer in the data storage industry, Seagate has followed this elegant and powerful formula. A product you can count on is one that keeps getting high-quality scores over its lifetime — no matter when it’s tested. That is why our quality assurance work is never done. We put our solutions through over 160 rigorous quality tests. We measure various aspects of quality from the time a hard drive is just a glimmer in a designer’s eye through its end of life. Because quality over time — at any point in time — is the kind of reliability we can believe in. The drive’s head (as tiny as a flake of pepper) flies the height of the human hair’s thickness above a disk rotating at over 80 mph. The head-disk interface is a key focus of quality assurance. What do our customers need? Seagate's craftspeople are always dreaming up the answers to this question. Whether it’s about how close the head of a drive hovers over the plate with data or about ensuring compatibility with real-time data processing at the edge, quality must accompany innovation. Engineers take stock of customers’ needs and puzzle out technologies that meet them. They button up the design of our components, answering the key question about the product’s feasibility: Is the technology mature enough that we can manufacture millions of units? If the answer is yes, the product advances to production. After a product idea is deemed feasible, design can begin. The customer and marketing requirements are translated into parameters that have to be met as part of the Reliability and Quality Certification process. As parts are built, testing determines what works and what has to improve. A great deal of building and rebuilding ensues. Over 160 quality tests take place. They include the 6-week reliability testing to demonstrate mean time between failures, and checks examining temperature, voltage, corrosion, shock and vibration, acoustics, etc. Drives are tested at temperatures as high as 167°F. That’s much hotter than the sizzling Death Valley, where record heat hovers around 134°F. Engineers use these high-temp and high-humidity environments to look for corrosion, outgassing and contamination. Climate change affects quality, too. “A cloud service provider may adapt a strategy of greening, so less energy is spent on cooling,” explains Steven Crochiere, Senior Director, Materials Science and Contamination Engineering. “As a result, drives are expected to operate at higher temps, which changes our quality requirements throughout the supply chain. In order to anticipate that, we might change the temperature requirements from, say, 85°C to 100°C.” We help maximise humanity’s potential by delivering world-class, precision-engineered data solutions developed through sustainable and profitable partnerships. CARING foremost about the value of data and its impact on the human experience. CREATING reliable solutions through breakthrough R&D and precision engineering. COLLABORATING to create value for our customers greater than the sum of the individual contributors.