Toshiba 8TB 3.5-Inch MG Series 6Gb SATA HDD Available

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) announces volume availability of its next MG Series HDD – the MG05ACA800 – providing 8TB ⁽¹⁾ for business critical servers and shared storage systems.

With a 33% increase in capacity from the previous 6TB SATA generation, this drive is the first firm’s 8TB SATA 6.0Gbit/s ⁽²⁾ capacity-optimized storage for the enterprise, making it the largest capacity ever produced by the company. The drive improves sustained transfer rate performance by 12% when compared to the MG04ACA.

This 8TB model can help to improve the operational efficiency of storage infrastructure by increasing the capacity available in the industry-standard 26.1mm high form-factor. The drive’s high capacity SATA interface and performance characteristics match-up with requirements for applications such as software-defined storage infrastructures, public and private cloud deployments, digital archives and disk-based backup and data protection solutions.

The drive’s power management features help to optimize operating costs and operating environments during off-peak activity periods. The 8TB SATA HDD is designed for 24×7 operation and provides a 550TB transferred-per-year rated workload ⁽³⁾, with a 2,000,000-hour MTTF ⁽⁴⁾ rating. Additionally, this is the first company’s enterprise capacity SATA model to support the new industry-standard host-initiated power-disable feature for improved device management capability.

“Accommodating rapid data growth continues to be a prime focus for both cloud-scale and on premise IT environments,” said Scott Wright, director, marketing, HDD, Toshiba America Electronic Components. “Toshiba’s new 8TB SATA enterprise-capacity HDD provides high capacity per-spindle. This helps OEMs and cloud service providers (CSPs) deliver enterprise storage capacity for business critical workloads that need to keep pace with rapid data growth.“

As was recently announced, IDC market report ⁽⁵⁾ identified Toshiba as the fastest growing HDD vendor segment in 2016 over 2015, as measured by revenue and units. Company’s growth was aided by their comprehensive array of HDD model offerings across different primary market segments. This 8TB SATA HDD, part of the MG Series, is aimed at enterprise capacity and data center needs.

In February 2017, near-line enterprise HDD production number reached 10,000,000 units.

The MG Series HDDs, which are near-line enterprise HDDs, are sampling to OEMs and systems integrators.

Typical use cases include tiered storage infrastructure for public and private cloud deployments; virtual desktop interface (VDI); email servers, data-protection and other business-critical systems use-cases; public and private cloud storage; software defined storage; business critical servers; business critical storage systems (including NAS and SAN); disk-based backup systems (including cloud-scale data protection); data archives and digital records storage; and SMB servers and storage platforms.

Click to enlarge

⁽¹⁾ Definition of capacity: Toshiba defines a megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1TB = 2⁴⁰ = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft OS and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.
⁽²⁾ Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.
⁽³⁾ HDDs keep track of various drive usage such as power on hours, lifetime writes and lifetime reads from the host computer. With this data we calculate an Annualized Workload Rate, under 40°C ambient environments, Annualized Workload Rate = (Lifetime Writes + Lifetime Reads) * (8760/Lifetime Power On Hours) in case Power On time is 8760h or longer. Otherwise (i.e. Power On time is shorter than 8760h), Annualized Workload Rate = (Lifetime Writes + Lifetime Reads) Each drive is designed to perform up to the Annualized Workload Rate stated, after which the drive may be expected to decline. The Annualized Workload Rate in no way alters the warranty policy for such drive.
⁽⁴⁾ MTTF is not a guarantee or estimate of product life; it is a statistical value related to mean failure rates for a large number of products which may not accurately reflect actual operation. Actual operating life of the product may be different from the MTTF.
⁽⁵⁾ Fastest growing HDD vendor in 2016 over 2015 as measured by revenue and units based on IDC Worldwide 4Q16 HDD Shipment Results and Four-Quarter Forecast Update (Feb 2017 – Doc #US42306617).