Toshiba First in Industry to Verify 12-Disk Stacking Technology for 3.5-Inch HDDs

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation is first ^[1] in the storage industry to verify 12-disk stacking technology for high-capacity HDDs.

By combining this achievement with Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) technology, the company aims to introduce 40TB ^[2] -class 3.5-inch ^[3] HDDs for data centers to the market in 2027.

This revolutionary stacking technology leverages advanced design and analysis technologies Toshiba has cultivated in developing thin, compact products, and adds two disks to the standard 10-disk, 3.5-inch disk track that the company uses in its nearline HDDs. Key advances include the development of new dedicated parts in the stack, and replacement of the current aluminum substrate medium with a glass substrate that offers greater durability and allows thinner designs. These advances deliver improved mechanical stability and in-plane accuracy, higher density and greater reliability.

”Data generation and storage continue to explode as cloud services expand, streaming video services gain in popularity, and generative AI and data science enjoy rapid growth. Recognizing the need to raise storage capacities”, said Raghu Gururangan, VP, engineering and product marketing, Toshiba America Electronic Components, added, “Toshiba’s 12-disk HDD platform delivers the scalability and reliability needed to support the exponential growth in AI-driven data center storage, enabling exabyte-class capacity with proven recording technologies.”

Toshiba is also investigating the use of 12-disk stacking technology with next-gen Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The goal is higher-capacity HDD solutions that keep up with ever-growing storage demands from data centers while realizing a lower TCO for customers.

John Chen, VP, TrendFocus, stated, “Toshiba’s ability to design HDDs with increased platter counts has been demonstrated over the past decade, enabling it to achieve higher capacity points using well-tested recording technologies along with improvements in head and media design. As the first HDD company to announce plans to commercialize a 12-disk HDD, the company paves a path for competitive high-capacity HDD offerings that will be further enhanced by its future transition to HAMR.”

Toshiba’s new 12-disk stacking technology will be featured at the IDEMA Symposium on October 17, 2025 in Kawasaki, Japan.

^[1] Toshiba research, as of October 14, 2025
^[2] Definition of capacity: One terabyte (TB) = one 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.
^[3] 3.5-inch mean the form factor of HDDs. They do not indicate drive’s physical size.