Curtis Stevens

Overview

Curtis Stevens is a Strategist at Seagate Technology focused on hard disk drive (HDD) fault tolerance and drive regeneration. He was among the first group to design how shingled magnetic recording (SMR) works, and at OCP Global Summit 2025 he presented Seagate's drive regeneration program, which uses storage element depopulation to keep degraded drives in service after a single-head failure rather than replacing them. His central argument is that the typical data center runs at about a 5% rate of nonfunctional drives — of the millions of drives deployed, roughly 5% are nonfunctional at any time — and that most of that lost capacity can be recovered without new hardware.