Toshiba took the veils off the industry’s first ever 16 TB capacity hard drive. This took place at CES 2019. The hard drive is called MG08 series HDD and has been designed for the specific purpose of offering consistent performance metrics while relying on two-dimensional magnetic recording.
The MG08 series hard drives by Toshiba are filled with helium and possess a 1.7 TB PMR platter. They also feature 18 reader/writer TDMR heads. With a 7200 RPM spindle speed and a SATA 6 or 12 Gbps interface, the HDDs are suited for nearline applications that make use of hundreds of drivers on racks.
While it is true that many of the users really don’t care much about the hardware storage owing to the growing storage facilities on the cloud, however, the physical storage is far more secure and fast as opposed to cloud services. That is why we are happy to see that Toshiba is still staying the course with its MG08 series.
According to a press release from Toshiba about the MG08 series, ‘The MG08 Series is Toshiba’s second-generation helium-sealed HDD family, and eighth-generation Enterprise Capacity HDD family. Toshiba has delivered its industry-leading 16TB capacity and improved power efficiency by utilizing the 9-disk helium design, introduced last year in 14TB models, and its own advanced precision laser welding process to ensure the helium remains sealed inside the drive case. The MG08 features 7,200rpm performance, a 550TB per year workload rating[3], a 2.5 million-hour MTTF[4], a 512Mib cache buffer[5], and a choice of SATA and SAS interfaces—all in an industry-standard, 3.5-inch[6] form factor.’
Toshiba has unveiled the MG08 services while stressing on the point that the company is committed to enhancing the HDD platform so that it can meet the storage needs of the upcoming gadgets. Not only does the HDD can prove beneficial to the average customer, but it can also help improve cloud stability for service providers. According to Toshiba, ‘Toshiba’s new 16TB MG08 Series delivers new levels of storage capacity and density while delivering improved power efficiency for our cloud-scale and storage solutions customers. Only high-density HDD technology can achieve our customers’ critical TCO objectives at the cost of pennies per GB’
There is no word on the pricing yet, but Toshiba plans on releasing the HDD later in January.