IDEMA Symposium: Toshiba Demos Nearline 3.5-Inch HDD with 32TB on 10 Disks with HAMR

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation (Toshiba) has successfully achieved storage capacities of over 30TB ^[1] with 2 next-gen large capacity recording technologies for HDDs: HAMR and MAMR.

The demonstration drives represent a milestone in the advance toward commercial products based on each of these emerging recording formats.

HAMR, one of the 2 technologies that are driving forward next-gen high-capacity data recording, boosts magnetic recording capabilities by locally heating the disk with near-field light. Toshiba achieved 32TB on 10 disks and adoption of SMR technology. The company plans to start shipping test sample ^[2] HDDs with HAMR technology in 2025.

The other technology is MAMR, which uses microwaves to enhance magnetic recording capabilities. The firm was the first ^[3] to demo its effectiveness and started mass production of 1st-generation drives in 2021. The company achieved 31TB by stacking 11 disks, utilizing SMR technology, and improving signal processing.

These new achievements were made possible through years of close collaborative work with Resonac Corporation, a HDD media manufacturer, and TDK Corporation, a HDD head manufacturer. Toshiba and its working partners are committed to continue developing both HAMR and MAMR technologies in order to provide higher capacity HDDs to meet the growing storage demand of the cloud and datacenters.

A technical lecture detailing the demonstration will be presented at the IDEMA Symposium scheduled for May 16.

[1] Definition of capacity: 1TB = one trillion bytes, but storage capacity actually available may vary, depending on operating environment and formatting. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.
[2] The test sample capacity aims for 28 to 30TB with Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) format.
[3] Toshiba research, as of December 24, 2021