Toshiba has introduced its latest hard drives aimed primarily at cloud datacenters and hyperscalers. The new drives are the MG11-series HDDs offer up to 24 TB capacity and use conventional magnetic recording technology and the MA11-series with a 28 TB capacity that uses shingled magnetic recording to maximize capacity, albeit at the cost of compatibility.
Toshiba's newest MG11 and MA11 HDDs share the same 10-platter helium-sealed platform with a 7200 RPM spindle speed and enterprise-grade enhancements to improve reliability and longevity in 24/7 environments. The new hard drives come with a 1 GB buffer to maximize their performance, so MG11 HDDs are among the fastest drives in the industry with a sustained transfer speed of 295 MB/s as well as a SATA 6 Gbps or a SAS 12 Gbps interface.
Both MG11 and MA11 hard drives use Toshiba's flux control microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology, but the MG11 uses conventional magnetic recording that does not use 'shingling' whereas MA11 use shingled magnetic recording to maximize capacity. MA11 belongs to host-managed SMR drives, so companies that will use these drives will have to optimize their software for these drives and their shingled configuration.
One of the interesting things about Toshiba's MG11 and MA11 HDDs is that Toshiba has managed to increase capacity of the base CMR model by 16% by shingling it. Normally, SMR enables a 10% capacity increase, though with technologies like OptiNAND and UltraSMR, Toshiba's rival Western Digital enabled a 20% increase with shingling. Apparently, Toshiba is getting close to that.
The latest HDDs from Toshiba feature an annual workload rating of 550 TB and a 2.5 million hours MTBF. Also, the MG11-series drives also come with security options like sanitize instant erase (SIE) and self-encrypting drive (SED) technology, which help protect sensitive data in various applications, from online backup to video surveillance.
"Backed by 50 years of continuous HDD innovation, the Mx11 family delivers new levels of capacity and total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiency enabling customers to optimize operational costs while expanding their data center infrastructure," said Atsushi Toyama, General Manager of Toshiba’s Storage Products Sales & Marketing Division.
Sample shipments of the MG11 series will begin this month, with the MA11 series following in the fourth quarter of this year.
