Toshiba Following Western Digital/HGST With 14TB 3.5-Inch HDD

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation announced the MG07ACA Series, the world’s first (1) enterprise 14TB (2) Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) HDD.

Using a 9-disk, helium-sealed design, the drive provides the power-efficient capacity and storage density needed by cloud-scale and enterprise storage solution providers to achieve their TCO objectives.

“We have raised the bar with the new MG07ACA Series 9-disk helium-sealed design,” said Akitoshi Iwata, VP of storage products division, Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. “By utilizing an innovative design, we continue to improve the benefits that high-capacity disk storage can deliver to our broad global customer base.”

The MG07ACA Series features both 14TB 9-disk and 12TB 8-disk models. The helium-sealed 3.5-inch (3) mechanical design realizes better storage density and a lower HDD operating power profile than the previous MG06ACA Series for optimal TCO in cloud-scale infrastructures.

The series also utilizes Toshiba Group’s laser welding technology to ensure the helium remains securely sealed inside the drive enclosure.

The drives support a 6Gb SATA interface and 7,200rpm access performance. The 9-disk 14TB models achieve a 40% increase in maximum capacity over previous MG06ACA 10TB models.

Additionally, the 14TB models improve power efficiency by over 50% (W/GB) (4).

“Toshiba’s first helium-sealed near line drive intercepts the market at a class-leading 14TB capacity with CMR,” said John Chen, industry analyst, Trendfocus. “Its early time-to-market for this capacity positions the company well to meet the storage needs of large hyperscale and cloud companies. Additionally, the company’s choice of a 9-disk platform paves the way to achieving higher capacities in future product generations.”

“While enterprise server and storage customers realize that shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology can improve HDD capacity, the adoption of SMR HDD products into server and storage systems is a transition that will take several years,” said John Rydning, research VP for HDD drives, IDC. “Toshiba’s new helium-sealed enterprise HDD is the world’s first 14TB of storage capacity using conventional rather than shingled magnetic recording technology, giving enterprise customers the highest capacity HDD available in the market today for existing server and storage system architectures.”

Sample deliveries of MG07ACA Series drives to customers sequentially begin now (5).

(1) Source: Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation, as of December 8, 2017
(2) Definition of capacity: 1TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer OS, 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 OS and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.
(3) Form Factor: 3.5-inch means the form factor of HDDs. They do not indicate drive’s physical size
(4) Power efficiency is calculated based on active idle power consumption divided by formatted capacity.
(5) The samples are for functional evaluation. Final specifications may be different.

Comments

Maybe you have remarked that the offering of all HDD makers is about the same and at about the same time - few months between them - and not only in terms of capacity, and since may years. As we already wrote, we got the explanation a long time go from a representative of Hitachi at CeBIT: all vendors have created a pool to share together all their patents with royalties paid to each one depending on the patents they are using for their products - that's probably a hard job to make this distribution - and
this method could be subject of a non-competitive agreement. This information never was officially confirmed or refuted.

For example today, Seagate is at 12TB (up to now), and Toshiba and Western Digital/HGST (since last October) at 14TB in 3.5 -inch form factor, all of them using innovative helium technology first revealed by HGST in 2013. Former record of 12TB based on helium by WD and Seagate was respectively released in December 2016 and March 2017.

Toshiba is just entering into a pre-announced 6Gb SATA 14TB helium. It's not the world's first highest capacity unit as WD has already reached this record but it's the first using Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) and not SMR like WD for its Ultrastar Hs14 also with 12Gb SAS interface.

SMR is designed specifically for sequential write environments and CMR "provides faster write performance compared to SMR recording since data doesn't need to be moved around the drive to overwrite old data for conventional magnetic recording," wrote recently expert Tom Coughlin in Forbes.

Thanks to helium, the Toshiba MG07ACA packs 9 disks inside the drive (8 for 12TB version) and 18 heads, meaning each platter containing 1.56TB on the two sides. It uses magnetic disks from Showa Denko (SDK) PMR platters and motors from Nidec.

Is it possible to reach 18TB and then 20TB into a 3.5-inch form factor with a new generation of helium-based drive? Either you increase the areal density on each disk or you add one more platter into the device that seems extremely complicated. But in both cases, we approach a technological limit. Next technologies to come are supposed to be MAMR (for WD that said to reach 16TB by 2019 and 40TB by 2025) or HAMR (for Seagate).

HAMR has been anticipated for the past 10- to 15-years, based on positioning a laser diode directly in front of the write head assembly, but has engineering complexities and manufacturing challenges that need to be resolved and nothing is happening.

MAMR required no laser and uses a microwave field generated from a spin torque oscillator (STO) that generates a microwave to provide assistance when magnetizing the grains prior to a write.

Specs of Toshiba MG07ACA