Hard drive capacities are going up and Toshiba is forging ahead. The new Toshiba MG08 series hits 16TB in 3.5″ hard drive form factors. The MG08 drives use what the company calls CMR or conventional magnetic recording. Many large capacity drives utilize SMR which has performance implications and often needs intelligent host control to ensure the drives work properly. Using CMR, the new Toshiba MG08 16TB drives hit a high capacity point without giving up performance.
Toshiba MG08 16TB Drive Specs
Here are the key specs for the drives:
Toshiba offers both SATA III and SAS3 versions of the helium-filled drive as MG08ACA16T and MG08SCA16T respectively. MTTF is rated at 2.5 million hours with a 10^16 UBER and a 550TB/ year workload rating.
That workload rating is lower than current SSDs in terms of drive writes per year. Hard drive storage is now used primarily for write once, and read both sequentially and infrequently scenarios.
Perhaps the Best Hard Drive Promo Video Ever
Toshiba has an accompanying video which will probably make your day. Perhaps you saw the sumo wrestler on this article’s cover and thought: why? Toshiba has perhaps the best hard drive promotional video ever.
Half of the video is this sumo character. There are laser beams, and a helium power up for the hard drive. I am not sure if this is the most informative video ever, but as a marketing ploy, it is getting exposure at least here.
The short video has a bunch of these gems of images. Check it out.
Final Words
Hard drive capacities keep inching forward. The new Toshiba MG08 16TB drives are another dot in this trend. Toshiba is one of the only vendors that is going head-to-head with the titans of the hard drive industry, WD and Seagate and their enterprise drives have generally been a high point for the company. We expect the Toshiba MG08 16TB drives to ship in the next few weeks to customers.
What does “550TB/year workload rating” (which is a VERY small number for a 16TB drive) mean – both practically and in terms of warranty? What happens if/when this number is exceeded (which will likely only take 700-900 hours of sequential IO per year)?
Are there any plans to review any of toshibas mg08 line maybe even the 14tb model. I would be eager to find out how the persistent write cache capabilities affect performance compared to other HDDs. I would also like to see how the drives fairs with synced write requests compared to other drives without PWC.
Eli, we have a new series coming out, mostly with WD/HGST and Seagate drives that William is working on. I will see if we can get MG08 drives for comparison.
Thanks Patrick, do appreciate the consideration, I know a lot goes into drive reviews, so adding a drive would be a special request . I thought the persistent write cache was a unique enough feature the would be interesting to see how it works with software that sends sync writes bypassing traditional drive caches like zfs and storage spaces. Thanks again 🙂