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Toshiba announced the “helium” HDD with a capacity of 14 TB

Toshiba анонсировала «гелиевый» HDD ёмкостью 14 ТбайтToshiba plans to start sample shipments of hard drives MG07ACA in the coming weeks.

Toshiba on Thursday introduced its family of helium-filled hard disk drives (hard disk drives, HDDs). The lineup includes the industry’s first hard drive with nine plates, which has a capacity of 14 TB and uses perpendicular magnetic recording (indicate instead magnetic recording, PMR). New HDD is aimed primarily at operators of cloud data centers (DPC), who welcome any opportunities to increase the capacity of their drives without physical expansion of its facilities. In addition, Toshiba also plans to sell their “helium” hard disks with a capacity of 12 TB, 14 TB through distributors.

Toshiba introduced its first helium-filled hard drives a few years later competitors. The development of “helium” HDD platform, Toshiba has taken years and the time was well spent. The platform used for the family of winchesters series MG07ACA, is the most complex and technologically advanced in the industry, because it supports up to nine plates, up to 18 heads, and the highest density PMR record to date. So, the flagship hard drive Toshiba MGA070ACA 14 TB uses nine disks with a capacity of 1.56 TB each. At the same time, the most advanced HDD competitors have eight disks of 1.5 TB each. To accommodate the nine plates in standard 3.5 inch drive, Toshiba had to use a new plate Showa Denko 0.635 mm (plate on the previous HDD, the company had a thickness of 0.8 mm), decrease the distance between the plates to 1.58 mm and use new head TDK. In addition, the “helium” hard drives Toshiba use a new sealed casing by laser welding, motors Nidec for helium-filled HDD, sealed internal connectors, and other necessary components.

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Because the winchesters MG07ACA designed racks for data centers that contain hundreds of vibrating hard drives, the new HDD use a variety of technological solutions to improve its reliability and durability. For example, a motor device is mounted to the lower and the upper plane of the drive. In addition, the HDD equipped with vibration sensors and the environment. Considering the fact that the distance between the plates inside the “helium” hard disks Toshiba is just of 1.58 mm, vibration is the enemy for such a HDD, but because the reduction of its impact is key to improving the reliability of these devices. Apparently, the manufacturer is confident in their new hard drives: Toshiba guarantee the absence of problems with an average working load of 550 TB, declares 2.5 million hours MTBF and delivers them with a standard five-year warranty.

In addition, the new hard drives Toshiba MG07ACA support special cache buffer (persistent write cache, PWC) based on NAND flash memory with protection against power outages (power loss protection, PLP). This buffer is extremely important for HDDs with 4 KB sectors that emulate 512-byte sectors for compatibility with legacy software. The fact that the buffer protects the data in case of power loss during operation read-modify-write (RMW) to align the source of the write request with the physical sectors that it needs to change. The fact that Toshiba supports RMW in their latest hard drives is important because the technology allows the company to offer new products to customers that use legacy systems, but may need to increase the volume of data storage.

This family of 3.5-inch enterprise HDDs Toshiba MG07ACA will consist of two models with a capacity of 12 TB, 14 TB. The flagship model is based on nine PMR-plates, whereas the smaller model has eight disks. Both drives support the spindle speed 7200 rpm cache buffer capacity of 256 MB and the Serial ATA 6 GB/s. Due to increased areal density, the flagship Winchester delivers maximum sustained data transfer rate of 260 MB/s, whereas the model with a capacity of 12 TB is a bit slower, its data transfer rate is about 250MB/s. as for random applications, Toshiba says that the maximum speed of random read (blocks 4 KB) the new HDD is 167 IOPS, while the maximum sequential write speed of 70 IOPS.

As is known, the density of helium is seven times lower than the density of air, which reduces the frictional force acting on the magnetic platters inside the hard drives, and reduces the force of gas flow, which affects the accuracy of positioning of the heads and plates. As a result, helium-filled hard drives consume less energy than the conventional “air” HDD. Thus, the power consumption Toshiba MG07ACA during operations read and write is 7.6 Watts, while in idle mode — 4.6 Watts. Thus, the power consumption of the new winchesters roughly corresponds to “helium” to the Seagate, but exceeds that from helium-filled hard drives production Western Digital. Meanwhile, the power consumption 4.6 Watts in standby mode is the lowest among large hard drives enterprise-class. If we consider indicators like energy efficiency in standby mode (hard drives of large capacity spend a lot of time in this mode, so metric makes sense), 14-TB Winchester Toshiba is the undisputed champion, consuming only 0.32 watts per TB.

As mentioned above, hard drives Toshiba MG07ACA mainly intended for cloud data centers, which store huge amounts of information. New hard drives are compatible with existing data center infrastructure (due to the use of PMR, SATA, and relatively low energy) and can increase the capacity of one rack with TB to 2440 2880 – 3360 TB, replacing the storage capacity of 10 TB. The possibility of increasing the capacity of the server rack by 40% without increasing power consumption is a huge advantage in the eyes of data center operators, because it allows you to maximise storage per square meter and per Watt.

The major advantage of a hard disk Toshiba MG07ACA 14 TB HGST Ultrastar before Hs14 is, of course, the use of technology PMR. Toshiba says that not all the customers in cloud data centers has invested in the management of shingled magnetic recording (shingled magnetic recordind, SMR) in software and therefore can use the drives with SMR since the technology has a number of features in terms of recording and rewriting data.

Toshiba plans to start sample shipments of hard drives MG07ACA in the coming weeks. Since the new drives are intended for data center operators will require several months to conduct the necessary tests and prepare to use the new HDD with their applications. In Toshiba say that volume shipments of hard drives MG07ACA for B2B channels is expected in late first – early second quarter of 2018. As soon as Toshiba will meet the demand for MG07ACA by their key customers, the company will begin selling hard disks with capacity of 12 TB, 14 TB through distributors, which means they will eventually be on Amazon.

Given the specifics of the server HDD, Toshiba did not disclose the cost of hard drives family MG07ACA. However, since the latter belong to the segment of ultra-high grade, we should expect the relevant price tags.

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