Toshiba Announces Its First 18 TB Hard Disk Drives Enabled by Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording

[Tsing]

Image: Toshiba



Japanese storage giant Toshiba will release its biggest hard drives yet in the form of the 18 TB MG09 Series. The company shared the news in a press release published today, which confirmed that the new 3.5-inch HDDs feature the company’s third-gen, nine-disk helium-sealed design and innovative Flux Control – Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR) technology to boost Conventional Magnetic Recording densities from 16 TB to 18 TB. In terms of performance, the HDDs feature a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM, a data transfer speed of 268 MiB/s, and a 550 TB per year workload rating.



“With its improved power efficiency and 18TB capacity, the MG09 Series helps cloud-scale infrastructure advance storage density to reduce...

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[Daniel_Doty]

Oh great, now we can nuked from our hard drives.

 

[Brian_B]

That’s cool and all, but I’m kinda over spinners all together at this point. It’s like having a big improvement announced to the horse drawn carriage, while sitting next to a Model T.

 

[Riccochet]

Great for enterprise NAS and cold storage where density matters.

I could replace my 4x 4TB RAID with one drive, if the price is right.

 

[Dan_D]

That’s cool and all, but I’m kinda over spinners all together at this point. It’s like having a big improvement announced to the horse drawn carriage, while sitting next to a Model T.

At this point, I'm just running a single 6TB drive in my machine and I barely use that. Everything that matters is being run from SSD's.

 

[Burticus]

I could knock my 4x6tb raid 5 down to 2x18tb raid 1 mirror.... except these things are probably going to cost a ton. But I bet they will get a lot of use for enterprise SAN storage.

 

[Dan_D]

I could knock my 4x6tb raid 5 down to 2x18tb raid 1 mirror.... except these things are probably going to cost a ton. But I bet they will get a lot of use for enterprise SAN storage.

A pair of those are appealing for that, but given the likely cost there are lots of other things I'd rather do to my PC for that money than add drives I really don't need. Even if it would allow me to pull some of them out of the machine. I've got 3x 2TB drives in it now that remain unconfigured because I don't really need them. The single 6TB drive is running, but it's not redundant in anyway.

 

[LazyGamer]

I assume that they're probably going to sell as many of these that they make. I also assume that that's not going to be a lot.

And while I don't expect that I'd be educating anyone here, there are two points that should be brought up:

• At these capacities, you'd want more than just single-redundancy; RAID6 (dual-parity) or triple-mirrors would be prudent
• At these capacities, actually getting all that data on and off the drive is a non-trivial affair, which is where the previous point comes from

If these were priced competitively with your average 4TB to 10TB desktop-class drive, they could be attractive for some usecases. I doubt that they will be during their useful lifespan, if only because mass flash storage is likely to fill that gap before these would ever become what we'd call 'affordable'.

Beyond that, I'll point out the quoted transfer rate. 268 MiB/s is both in the top-end of what 3.5" spinners can do, and also paltry compared to the ancient SATA and SAS interfaces that this drive will use. This is the real utility limit; it's a lot of storage that is just plain hard to use. If there isn't a real density requirement, very few applications would be served by these over more, smaller drives. These are only useful in terms of storage density and perhaps power usage, and I expect not more useful enough to really make them that attractive!

 

[Burticus]

I assume that they're probably going to sell as many of these that they make. I also assume that that's not going to be a lot.

And while I don't expect that I'd be educating anyone here, there are two points that should be brought up:

• At these capacities, you'd want more than just single-redundancy; RAID6 (dual-parity) or triple-mirrors would be prudent
• At these capacities, actually getting all that data on and off the drive is a non-trivial affair, which is where the previous point comes from

If these were priced competitively with your average 4TB to 10TB desktop-class drive, they could be attractive for some usecases. I doubt that they will be during their useful lifespan, if only because mass flash storage is likely to fill that gap before these would ever become what we'd call 'affordable'.

Beyond that, I'll point out the quoted transfer rate. 268 MiB/s is both in the top-end of what 3.5" spinners can do, and also paltry compared to the ancient SATA and SAS interfaces that this drive will use. This is the real utility limit; it's a lot of storage that is just plain hard to use. If there isn't a real density requirement, very few applications would be served by these over more, smaller drives. These are only useful in terms of storage density and perhaps power usage, and I expect not more useful enough to really make them that attractive!

All true.... but I think these are more aimed at enterprise / SAN market... In that case density is king, and IOPS can be made up with SSD cache. I don't see a lot of people putting a 18tb hdd in their PC. That is a whole lot of data to lose in one spot

 

[MadMummy76]

At this point all I'm interested in is large cheap SSDs to replace the aging spinners as storage.

 

[Riccochet]

All true.... but I think these are more aimed at enterprise / SAN market... In that case density is king, and IOPS can be made up with SSD cache. I don't see a lot of people putting a 18tb hdd in their PC. That is a whole lot of data to lose in one spot

This. Enterprise density is king, especially when rack space is limited. Flash for production, spinners in a NAS for backups.

 

[Endgame]

At this point all I'm interested in is large cheap SSDs to replace the aging spinners as storage.

Ah, but how much data is that really? I’ve long come to the realization that my most important data is less that 100GB (ex: my RAW wedding pictures). In all honesty, the rest of data isn’t that important. My stack of local movies rarely get watched, and I could just pull the disk off the shelf. My MP3 collection takes less than 20GB. My DVR share could be lost with no real effect - I stream more than I watch live and record anyway. My work scratch drive gets used, but the base data is heavily compressed and I can always pull the data down from work servers again if I need to. Also of note is that none of these things need speed, and spinners are plenty of performance for their role.

Higher performance flash - say double the performance of an Optaine 905p. I imagine that 2tb or less higher QD1 random performance would be drastically more useful than 8TB drives of super cheap, super junky QLC (or worse) flash.

 

[MadMummy76]

Ah, but how much data is that really?

About 24TB currently and slowly increasing.

I’ve long come to the realization that my most important data is less that 100GB (ex: my RAW wedding pictures). In all honesty, the rest of data isn’t that important.

I've already lost part of my "not that important" data in a raid corruption, this happened years ago, and I still think about it regularly how good would it be to retrieve it using some magic or ex machina. So, no, all of it is important, if it was important enough to save in the first place.
The really important bits like personal documents and pictures are stored at 5 separate locations.

My stack of local movies rarely get watched, and I could just pull the disk off the shelf. My MP3 collection takes less than 20GB. My DVR share could be lost with no real effect - I stream more than I watch live and record anyway.

Most of the data I lost is irreplacable, as they were recordings of sport events or downloads from youtube that were later deleted. I don't trust streaming as a reliable source or storage. Anything can be removed at any time without notice, so I always download everything from youtube and other streaming services that I Intend to watch again or later.

Higher performance flash - say double the performance of an Optaine 905p. I imagine that 2tb or less higher QD1 random performance would be drastically more useful than 8TB drives of super cheap, super junky QLC (or worse) flash.

I use multiple QLC drives and they are doing just fine. A million times better than any spinner.