WW Record for Internal 2.5-Inch HDD: 3TB by Toshiba

Toshiba Corporation’s Semiconductor & Storage Products Company announced the 3TB 2.5-inch HDD, the industry’s largest capacity as a 2.5-inch HDD product.

Utilizing PMR technology, the MQ03ABB300 achieves 750GB per platter, using a total of 4 platters to achieve storage of 3TB.

It is uitable for external personal storage devices and space-constrained use cases requiring high storage capacity,

Sample shipments will begin in May.

The MQ03ABB300 offers energy consumption efficiency with lower power consumption and 50% larger capacity compared to Toshiba’s previous generation 4-platter 2TB MQ01ABB200.

The MQ03ABB300 is suitable for single and multi-drive HDD home and SMB storage enclosures by providing space for storage. The power efficient design also makes it a suitable solution for USB connected external personal storage applications.

Comments

It's true that this new HDD is the internal drive with the highest capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor, the former record being 2TB by WD three years ago, a 15mm high device with also 4 platters and 8 heads.

But if this standard form factor is the same in width and length, they are four possibilities for the height: 7mm, 9.5mm and 15mm, enabling to fill them with one to four disks.

Here with 15mm z-height, the 5,400rpm 6Gb SATA unit cannot be integrated into notebooks accepting only 5mm, 7mm and 9.5mm units. That's why the new MQ03ABB300 can only be used into an external devices as Toshiba said. At the same time, the Japanese company released (see the press releases in today's news) its own external units, the Canvio Connect II Portable HDD and the Canvio Basics both at 3TB, this latter at $190 and officially "available for purchase in March 2015", then probably like the internal HDD, and with the possibility for other integrators to buy it to design their own external drives.

With 750GB into each 2.5-inch platter, Toshiba beats the record of 500GB from other HDD makers, all of them using PMR. Wait probably for the firm to announce other 2.5-inch HDDs using this record areal density in thinner internal HDDs, especially devices with one or two disks for 750GB and 1.5TB respectively.

Now the question is: With PMR, after 750GB, is it possible to reach next step, a milestone of 1TB on one 2.5-inch platter?

Record Capacity for 2.5-Inch HDDs of More than 500GB

Date of
Announcement

Vendor

Capacity

No. of
Disks/Heads

Z-Height

01/2008

Samsung

500GB

3/6

9.5mm

07/2009

1TB

3/6

12.5mm

09/2010

Seagate

1.5TB

4/8

15mm

03/2012

2TB

4/8

15mm

01/2015

Toshiba

3TB

4/8

15mm

(Source: StorageNewsletter.com)

The first 2.5-inch HDD was designed by defunct US manufacturer PrairieTek in 1988. The PrairieTek 220 had a capacity of 20MB on two disks.