Toshiba Plans to Sample 18TB MAMR HDD by the End of the Year

In the hard drive market, manufacturers always roll out various types of SSDs to satisfy your needs, for example, industrial, commercial and more. With an SSD, you can enjoy the fast performance.

However, for mechanical hard disks, they are attractive due to the large capacity. In order to meet your demands for large storage capacity, vendors should focus on disk technology, which is the most core point.

It is reported that Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) has recently announced that it has finished the development of its microwave assisted magnetic (MAMR) platters for the next-gen hard disks. And this company plans to ship platters to Toshiba. And Toshiba will sample the new 18TB MAMR HDD by end of this year.

Additionally, SDK will release disks that are based on HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording) technology in the future.

Toshiba 18TB MAMR HDD Will Be Shipping

This move is a shift for Toshiba. As you know, earlier this year, Toshiba has released a 16TB CMR hard drive. The conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology can boost capacity by switching the air in the drive out for helium to reduce drag and improve heat transfer. With the help of SDK, the latest design, Toshiba 18TB HDD, would switch from CMR to MAMR to increase the capacity.

As to MAMR, the technology uses microwave oscillators on magnetic heads to boost the recording capacity of a disk. In MAMR, a magnetic write head contains an STO (spin torque oscillator) that generates microwaves, which can lower the surface resistance of the underlying recording media, making writing bits easier.

And the new 3.5-inch platters from SDK offer 2TB capacity and a new magnetic recording layer. Using microwaves can lower the coercivity of the magnetic recording layer.

SDK has not confirmed whether the disk substrate for its 2TB media is glass or aluminum. But according to Western Digital, both should be very similar to those used for today’s platters depending on the PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology. For Toshiba and its users, this means predictable reliability and pricing.

According to SDK, Toshiba plans to use nine 2TB platters for the 18TB MAMR nearline HDD. That is to say, it looks like the MAMR disk from SDK may be based on the latest aluminum substrates, allowing for building 0.635mm thick PMR media. Note that this is an educated guess rather than an official confirmation.

As a provider of HDD platters, SDK naturally doesn’t reveal any information about Toshiba 18TB MAMR hard disk. For the performance, although increased areal density will improve the maximum sustained transfer rate, the IOPS per terabyte performance remains to be seen.

In addition to MAMR media, SDK is also expected to supply HAMR-based platters, but it doesn’t reveal the exact timeline for HAMR disks.

Final Words

Toshiba hasn’t disclosed much information about its plans. But SDK has claimed that Toshiba will be shipping sample quantities of the 3.5-inch 18TB MAMR drive by the end of the year. Besides, there hasn’t been any information about the pricing for the drive.