Seagate will launch an artificial intelligence platform that will reduce the cost and time required to manufacture hard drives. Seagate hopes to be able to use all the information it provides to power its Nvidia IA system to keep hard disk manufacturing alive in the SSD era, as so many stages of the manufacturing process are already controlled by sensors.
What is Project Athena?
Most Seagate hard drives are manufactured in various factories around the world, and there are about 1000 processes required to manufacture mechanical drives.
Due to a large amount of information they receive from sensors on the production line, Seagate plans to upload them to a cloud computing platform for analysis. This is called Project Athena: a company consisting of Seagate, HPE, and Nvidia.
The system has already passed its first worldwide test at the Normandale factory. The Athena project collected millions of microscopic images of the magnetic heads during production to control quality, allowing Seagate to save up to 20% of costs and 10% of production time.
In a world full of SSDs, reducing the cost of manufacturing hard drives is more important than ever. These drives exist because of their cost efficiency, but as the prices of NAND flash memory fall, hard disk manufacturers feel under pressure. In 2017, for example, Seagate closed one of its largest factories.