Toshiba MG08 Series: The World’s First 16TB TDMR HDD

Toshiba MG08 Series Made Debut

As one of the giant manufacturers of storage devices, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. announced the MG08 Series on January 7, 2019. By integrating the industry-leading 9-disk design pioneered by Toshiba, the MG08 Series provide:

• A capacity of 16TB
• The performance of 7,200 rpm
• A 2.5 million-hour MTTF
• A 512Mib cache buffer
• A choice of SATA and SAS interfaces

Till now, the Toshiba MG08 series is considered as the largest Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) HDD. This new series delivers a new level of hard disk drive density, which does a good job in increasing the hard drive capacity.

Equipped with SATA 6.0 Gbit/s or a 12.0 Gbit/s SAS interface, the Toshiba 16TB MG08 series can be easily integrated into the industry-standard 3.5-inch form-factor. Therefore, the MG08 series can be found in the following places:

• Tiered storage infrastructure
• Software-defined data center infrastructure
• The cloud-scale Server and storage infrastructure
• Data center data-protection and data back-up infrastructure
• The file and object storage solutions
• The business-critical servers and storage
• Compliance data life-cycle management
• Capacity-optimized cloud-scale and rack-scale storage systems
• Workloads and use-cases which benefit from high capacity per spindle
• …

This happens mainly because the Toshiba MG08  series is able to reduce the footprint and operational burden of cloud-scale storage infrastructure, and business critical servers and storage systems.

Advanced Technologies

1. The helium inside the 9- disk technology is actually sealed by the precision industrial laser welding technology of Toshiba (the company’s second-generation helium-sealed technology).
2. The massive 16TB capacity of Toshiba MG08 series is indeed delivered by making use of the wonderful CMR recording technology. This also contributes to the optimum application compatibility and data reliability.
3. The two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) technology is used in the MG08-series HDDs, which are said to be designed for nearline applications.
4. The 512e or 4Kn Advanced Format Sector technology is adopted in the 512e model. Meanwhile, the Toshiba Persistent Write Cache Technology is also adopted for the purpose of data loss protection in unexpected events, for instance, sudden power loss.

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Main Features of MG08 Series

Feature 1: large capacity.

The Toshiba MG08 series provides 16TB capacity: it is 33% more than that of the 12TB hard drives (which are widely adopted currently) and 14% more than that of its prior 14TB models.

Feature 2: great compatibility.

The Toshiba MG08 16TB drives can be compatible with almost all commonly seen operating systems (such as Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows XP, and Windows Server OS) as well as a wide range of applications.

Feature 3: high workload.

The MG08 series is actually a good choice for both cloud and traditional datacenter environments, in which the mixed random and sequential read and write workloads are involved. The workload rating is indeed 550TB in total per year.

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Verdict

To be specific, the MG08 series is the second-generation helium-sealed HDD family and the eighth-generation Enterprise Capacity HDD family of Toshiba. The release of the Toshiba 16TB MG08 series further expresses the efforts Toshiba has made to promote hard disk design; Toshiba is on the way to meet the increasing needs for storage devices that can be used in the cloud-scale servers and storage infrastructure.

The emergence of this industry-leading 16TB CMR capacity HDD is a good choice for cloud-scale service providers and storage solutions designers. By adopting the large capacity MG08 series, they can actually achieve a higher hard disk storage density for cloud, hybrid-cloud and on-premises rack-scale storage.

All thanks to the 16TB capacity and improved power efficiency, the Toshiba MG08 series is able to reduce the TCO of the storage infrastructures which are designed for applications, including:

• Data protection
• Content service
• Digital archive
• Big data aggregation