Quantity three within the onerous drive maker’s league, Toshiba, has introduced merchandise of 24TB and 28TB. These are the 24TB MG11, which is typical magnetic recording (CMR) HDD know-how, and the 28TB MA11, which makes use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) know-how.
Seagate was the primary to market round a 12 months in the past with comparable drives, the CMR 24TB Exos X24 and an SMR variant at 28TB. Western Digital adopted on the finish of 2023 with its Ultrastar DC HC580 (24TB) and HC680 (28TB SMR). Toshiba’s earlier HDD flagship capacity-wise was the 22TB typical MG10F.
Toshiba’s new MG11 and MA11 onerous disk drives (HDDs) are available 3.5in type issue. They comprise 10 platters per HDD, are helium-filled, have 1GB of NAND flash as cache and revolve at 7,200rpm. That cache measurement permits for a most throughput of 309MBps. That compares to the Seagate and Western Digital merchandise which have cache of 515MBps and high out at 295MBps and 298MBps respectively.
Toshiba onerous drives use its unique FC-MAMR know-how. That is flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording, through which writes are facilitated by altering the magnetic qualities of the disk platter by use of microwaves. Â
With out this mechanism, the magnetic area of the pinnacle – corresponding to on a traditional HDD – is much less exact and extra prolonged. This implies the information occupies a higher space, with much less saved per observe, so the overall capability is decrease.
The MG11 can join through 6Gbps SATA and 12Gbps SAS. The MA11 solely gives 6Gbps SATA connectivity. That makes its throughput about half of the MG11, within the area of 150MBps.
Shingled magnetic recording know-how superposes or overlaps successive knowledge tracks in a sample harking back to the way in which roof tiles overlap.
However SMR onerous drives face a selected constraint as a result of it’s not doable to switch the contents of a observe with out rewriting tracks round it. This implies SMR drives can solely actually be used for knowledge that’s written once-and-for-all, corresponding to backups, archives or paperwork saved to be read-only.
SMR onerous drives are generally utilized by hyperscalers for chilly storage providers as a result of they’ll make use of the talents wanted to cope with constraints that include HDDs with superposed disk tracks.Â
Within the coming weeks, Seagate is ready to announce HDDs of the subsequent era, specifically 30TB in typical recording and 32TB SMR.
All that comes towards a backdrop of spinning disk (SAS and SATA) onerous drive costs that stay considerably less expensive than flash drives.
HDD prices per gigabyte have held regular for the previous 12 months or so, and are at the moment at round $0.039/GB, in contrast with $0.085/GB for flash.
That value per gigabyte for spinning disk was $0.041/GB in early April. The present common pricranges from $0.041/GB for SAS and $0.036/GB for SATA.
Earlier this 12 months, Rainer Kaese, senior supervisor in enterprise improvement for storage merchandise at Toshiba Electronics Europe, instructed Laptop Weekly in a podcast that he anticipated onerous disk drives to succeed in capacities of 40TB or 50TB within the coming many years, with a whole lot of terabytes doable however not essentially commercially viable.
