Toshiba may be closer to launching its 20TB nearline hard disk drives than it lets on, documentation suggests.
The company’s latest 18TB hard drives fall under the MG09 family, but a list maintained by the organization responsible for overseeing SATA technology shows that next-generation MG10 drives have already passed interoperability testing, which means they are almost ready to ship.
Like the MG09 series of drives, the MG10 range is expected to feature flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology (FC-MAMR), but will utilize a new 10-disk platform to deliver the capacity increase.
In addition to new nearline HDDs, the testing documentation shows Toshiba is preparing MG10 drives for NAS and desktop use cases too. TechRadar Pro has asked Toshiba for confirmation.
Next-generation hard disk drives
The new information on the MG10 series comes a few days after Toshiba released an updated long-term roadmap for its nearline hard disk drives.
The roadmap indicates the company is on track to deliver a series of significant capacity increases over the next handful of years, courtesy of proprietary recording technologies and disk stacking techniques.
Although Toshiba is late to deliver a 20TB HDD (both Western Digital and Seagate have already brought 20TB models to market), the firm intends to roll out a 10-platter 26TB drive based on microwave assisted switching (MAS-MAMR) by the end of fiscal 2022 and an 11-platter 30TB model roughly a year later.
To pave the way for even more capacious drives, Toshiba intends to shift towards heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. The company says it plans to offer its first 35TB HDD, based on HAMR, before 2026.
“Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers’ needs,” said Ragfhu Gururangan, VP Engineering and Product Marketing at Toshiba America.
“Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) of our nearline HDDs.”
Via Tom's Hardware
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