From AI Clouds to Gaming Consoles: Seagate’s Sameer Bhatia on the Evolution of Storage
Artificial Intelligence and modern, photo-realistic video games are generating unprecedented mountains of data. To keep pace, data centre architectures and home gaming setups are undergoing radical infrastructure shifts. To unpack these changes, we spoke with Sameer Bhatia, Senior Regional Director for India, Middle East, Turkiye, and Africa at Seagate Technology.
Q1. AI is driving rapid growth in data creation and retention. How is this changing the role of high-capacity hard drives within modern data centre architecture?
AI is creating and using enormous volumes of data, but the bigger shift is that more of this data needs to be stored, remain accessible and be reused over longer periods because its future value may not yet be known. As AI adoption grows and retention increases, data centres are under greater pressure to store more information efficiently and at scale.
This is making high-capacity hard drives an increasingly important part of modern data centre architecture. They provide the scale and economics needed to manage growing datasets efficiently. Today, more than 80% of exabytes in large data centres are stored on hard drives, reflecting their continued importance across AI and cloud environments.
Flash is essential where speed and responsiveness are critical, while hard drives provide the high capacity needed to store large volumes of data cost-effectively.
As AI becomes more widely used, data centres will increasingly rely on both technologies working together, balancing performance, capacity and cost depending on how the data is being used.
Q2. As organisations retain more data for AI workloads, how are advances such as HAMR helping the storage industry address growing capacity requirements efficiently and sustainably?
As AI adoption grows, data centres need to increase storage capacity without increasing their physical footprint, power use and infrastructure costs at the same pace.
Technologies such as Seagate’s heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) help address this by increasing areal density, allowing more data to be stored on each disk in a hard drive. Our Mozaic platform uses HAMR to increase capacity within the same standard drive form factor, helping data centres store more data using fewer drives and less supporting infrastructure.
The impact becomes significant on scale. In a modelled one-exabyte deployment, Seagate’s latest Mozaic technology delivers approximately a 47% improvement in infrastructure efficiency compared with standard 30TB drives. This translates to roughly 100 square feet less data centre footprint and about 0.8 million kilowatt-hours lower annual energy consumption.
Q3. Seagate has demonstrated an NVMe HDD proof of concept incorporating NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. What could a more unified storage interface mean for the design and management of future AI infrastructure?
AI infrastructure increasingly relies on both SSDs and high-capacity hard drives, but these technologies have traditionally used different interfaces and supporting systems. Bringing them onto a common NVMe interface could make storage infrastructure simpler to design and manage.
Seagate’s NVMe HDD proof of concept shows how hard drives and SSDs could work within a unified architecture. This could reduce the need for separate adapters and software layers, while streamlining connectivity and making it easier for data centres to manage different types of storage together.
For AI infrastructure, the potential benefit is a simpler and more flexible approach to storage. Organisations could combine the speed of SSDs with the capacity and cost advantages of hard drives within a more unified storage environment. NVMe-over-Fabrics could also support this approach across distributed storage environments, helping organisations scale their storage architecture as AI data requirements grow.
Q4. As game libraries continue to grow, what role can high-capacity HDDs play alongside SSDs in helping gamers balance capacity, performance and cost?
As games become richer and more complex, storage requirements are growing alongside them. Modern games can range from 20GB to over 100GB, while updates and downloadable content add further pressure on available space.
HDDs and SSDs can serve different needs within a gaming setup. SSDs provide faster speeds and shorter load times, making them well suited to games where performance is a priority. High-capacity hard drives offer a cost-effective way to store larger game libraries and archived content.
For India’s growing gaming community, using both can provide greater flexibility. It allows gamers to prioritise speed for the games they play often while maintaining enough capacity for an expanding library, without constantly having to delete and redownload large titles.
Q5. As cloud gaming and distributed computing grow, what storage requirements will become increasingly important for the infrastructure supporting these services?
Cloud gaming places more of the computing and storage behind the gaming experience in data centres and distributed infrastructure. As these services grow and scale to more users and locations, infrastructure providers will need storage architectures that can expand efficiently while keeping large game libraries available and accessible where and when they are needed.
Different storage technologies can play complementary roles. SSDs are well suited to applications and workloads that require rapid access and low latency, while high-capacity hard drives provide the scale and economics to store and manage large volumes of data. Using both allows infrastructure providers to balance performance, capacity, and cost according to the workload.
Q6. How is Seagate evolving its gaming storage portfolio to meet consumers’ growing need to manage increasingly large game libraries?
Gaming today involves much more than the game itself. Larger game libraries, captured gameplay and streaming content are driving greater storage needs. Gamers want the flexibility to expand capacity and stay in control of their data without compromising performance or having to constantly delete content.
Seagate’s gaming portfolio spans HDDs and SSDs across PC, PlayStation and Xbox, giving gamers a range of options based on their platform, library size and performance needs.
High-capacity external hard drives provide a cost-effective way to retain larger game libraries, while SSDs offer faster speeds and shorter load times for gamers who prioritise performance. Seagate also offers platform-specific storage solutions designed for PlayStation and Xbox.
This flexibility is particularly relevant in markets such as India, where growing gaming communities, larger game downloads and the need for affordable storage expansion are changing how gamers manage their libraries. Ultimately, the focus is on giving gamers more choice as their storage requirements grow.
Q7. Can you shed light on Seagate’s console portfolio of storage options for PlayStation and Xbox gamers looking to hold on to their downloaded library?
For console gamers, Seagate offers officially licensed storage solutions designed specifically for PlayStation and Xbox platforms, giving players more flexibility to expand capacity and hold on to growing game libraries.
For PlayStation, Seagate offers external Game Drives for PS4 and PS5, alongside the internal Game Drive PS5 NVMe SSD. These solutions give gamers more room for their libraries while supporting different needs, from added capacity to faster performance.
For Xbox, Seagate offers external Game Drives and Game Drive Hubs. Xbox Series X|S games can be stored on these external drives, while Xbox One and compatible legacy titles can be played directly from them. These options help gamers expand their libraries and reduce the need to repeatedly delete and redownload large games.
