Toshiba MG10F Series 3.5-Inch CMR 22TB HDD with 10-Disk Helium-Sealed Design
On par with Seagate, WD reaching 26TB, 30TB next step
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on October 4, 2023 at 2:02 pmToshiba Electronics Europe GmbH announces its MG10F Series 22TB (1) HDD, a conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDD that leverages the firm’s 10-disk helium-sealed design.
As a key building block in cloud and storage infrastructure, the drive delivers 10% more capacity than the company’s prior-Gen 20TB model. Designed and engineered to meet their growing data storage needs of its largest customers, it is compatible with a range of applications and workloads for both cloud-scale and traditional data-center use cases. Its increased capacity helps cloud-scale infrastructure build higher storage densities at a lower TCO.
The MG10F Series HDD features 7,200rpm performance, a 550TB/year workload rating (2) , and a choice of SAS and SATA interfaces – all in a power-efficient helium-sealed, industry-standard 3.5-inch (3) form factor.
Sample shipments of the 22TB MG10F Series HDDs start immediately for SAS interface and in the 4Q23 for SATA interface.
Click to enlarge
[1] Definition of capacity: 1TB=1 trillion bytes, but storage capacity actually available may vary, depending on operating environment and formatting. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.
[2] Workload is a measure of data throughput in a year, and it is defined as the amount of data written, read or verified by commands from the host system.
[3] 3.5-inch means the form factor of HDDs. It does not indicate a drive’s physical size.
Comments
This Toshiba MG10F 3.5-Inch CMR 22TB HDD with 10 disks is the higher capacity device from the Japanese company, but it arrives after Seagate in April 2023 and WD in July 2022 also with 22TB.
The new device is about the same as the WD Red Pro HDDs (WD221KFGX) with 22TB helium CMR, 10 disks, with transfer rate of 291MB/s
On its side, the Seagate IronWolf Pro 22TB 3.5-Inch CMR helium-Based HDD 6Gb SATA has a rate 285MB/s and was announced at $600.
Today, the highest capacity HDD is the WD Ultrastar DC HC670 SMR drives at 26TB, ePMR, with 10 disks and 2.6TB per platter, probably with the help of Showa Denko starting shipment in November 2022 of 2.6TB disk media for 26TB nearline HDDs, introducing magnetic layer design and technology to produce fine crystals of magnetic substance on surface of aluminum platter.
Current available HDDs at 22TB and more,
all of them in 3.5-inch form factor and rotating at 7,200rpm
| Manufacturer | Model | Capacity | Interface |
| Seagate | IroWolf Pro | 22TB | SATA |
| Toshiba | MG10F | 22TB | SAS or SATA |
| WDC | Red Pro HDDs (WD221KFGX) | 22TB | SATA |
| WDC | Ultrastar DC HC670 | 26TB | probably SATA |
Currently, the most popular 3.5-inch HDDs in term of sales are 16TB from Seagate, Toshiba and WD if you look at big user Blackblaze.
It took WD roughly 5 years to more than double hard disk capacity from 12TB to 26TB. Will it take another 5 years to double that to 50TB with more disks and higher capacity per platter? We are far from the golden years when capacity was doubling each year!
What will be next gen after 26TB? Probably not 28TB (only +8%) but 30TB (+15%).
WD is already preparing for 30TB and beyond with dual actuators.
Leveraging its OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator, HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies, the firm is on a path to delivering 30TB+ HDDs.
"WD is confident that it can soon produce hard drives at a 30TB+ capacity level without needing to introduce entirely new technologies like HAMR, while HAMR is still on the horizon," Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP and GM, HDD business unit, WD, commented.
Main components, disk heads and platters, are ready for the next capacity.
For 30TB, Showa Denko announced as far as in December 2021 to have develops disk media With MAS-MAMR technology for HDDs up to 30TB in collaboration with Toshiba and TDK.
One month later, TDK reports shipping prototype HDD heads with MAS-MAMR next gen recording technology for 30TB HDDs.
According to Trendfocus, there remains behind-the-scenes activity in supplying materials to support HDD media thickness of less than the current 0.5mm. The thinking is that a future 12-disk HDD remains a possibility as a backup plan for some companies should their HAMR efforts falter.
At the same time, capacity of SSDs are incresaing much faster. We counted at least 30 SSD models at more than 30TB already released.
They have all the advantages compared to HDDs but price/GB (even if this parameter is declining) and need of sophisticated system for heat dissipation.
Subscribe to our free daily newsletter
