Toshiba has released the world’s largest capacity Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) hard disk drive – the monster 16 TB “MG08” series.
The company is targeting cloud-scale service providers and data centre operators with the “low cost” (see below) storage solution it said.
With cloud providers like AWS now touting archiving services priced as low as $0.00099/GB/month its cost will have to be competitive to contend with more searchable cloud-based archiving services if any buyers are hoping to use it on-prem.
Toshiba did not reveal storage cost estimates based on the MG08 in its release, beyond a broad “pennies per GB” note in a release: Computer Business Review has requested further information.
(Mystery surrounds the precise infrastructure used to underpin AWS’s Glacier and Deep Glacier archiving along with similar products: despite comments positing cloud-based archiving as an alternative to magnetic tape HDDs, many believe it to be magnetic tape; Toshiba’s marketing collateral with its cloud-provider focus adds grist to that mill).
See also: Did Amazon Just Kill Tape Storage?
The 16TB drive is the successors to Toshiba’s 14TB series, released last year.
Both drives are manufactured using a nine-disk helium design process first introduced with the 14TB model. Using sophisticated precision lasers Toshiba have sealed, via laser welding, helium into the drive case: this reduces the amount of drag, boosting energy efficiency as less power is needed to spin the platters in the drive.
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Conventional Magnetic Recording drives can be beneficial for enterprises running on-premise storage facilities, as the drive provides high capacity storage using non-volatile memory which can be stored in an offline manner.
Shuji Takaoka GM of Storage Products Sales at Toshiba commented in a statement: “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 a cost of pennies per GB.”
Read this: Dropbox Bets the Farm on Shingled Magnetic Recording
The MG08 HDD is the industry-standard 3.5 inch with a 26.1mm height form-factor which allows enterprise to quickly install it into their storage infrastructure and server drive bays.
Toshiba claim the 16TB drive is capable of a rotation speed of 7,200 rpm and a buffer size of 512 MiB. The drive itself while operational will emit sound at 20 decibels.
The Japanese manufacturing giant has given the drive an annual workload reliability rating of 550 TB per year and a mean time to failure rate of 2.5 million hours or 285 years, going to show just how reliable CMR is as a means of storage.
Toshiba have not released the pricing model for the MG08, but they have stated that they expect to ship samples of the drive in Q1 2019.
