Toshiba Unveils World’s First 16 TB Hard Drive

This week at CES 2019, Toshiba announced the computer industry’s first 16 terabyte capacity hard drive.

Called the MGO8-series HDD, the new tech is designed specifically to offer consistent performance metrics utilizing two-dimensional magnetic recording.

The MG08 series drives are helium-filled and have a 1.7 TB PMR platter. They also have 18 reader/writer TDMR heads. Featuring a 7200 RPM spindle speed and a SATA 6 or 12 Gbps interface, the HDDs are positioned to best suite nearline applications that used many hundreds of drivers on racks.

This announcement of new hard drive tech comes on the tails of consumers trending towards caring less and less about hardware storage thanks to growing cloud services.

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Even still, physical storage is faster and generally more secure, so it’s good to see Toshiba still setting the course for computer manufacturing.

If you’re interested in hearing a little bit more about the HDD’s capabilities, take a look at the statement from Toshiba’s press release below.

“The MG08 Series is Toshiba’s second-generation helium-sealed HDD family, and eighth-generation Enterprise Capacity HDD family. Toshiba has delivered its industry-leading 16TB capacity and improved power efficiency by utilizing the 9-disk helium design, introduced last year in 14TB models, and its own advanced precision laser welding process to ensure the helium remains sealed inside the drive case. The MG08 features 7,200rpm performance, a 550TB per year workload rating[3], a 2.5 million-hour MTTF[4], a 512Mib cache buffer[5], and a choice of SATA and SAS interfaces—all in an industry-standard, 3.5-inch[6] form factor.”

Toshiba made this announcement stressing that they are committed to furthering the HDD platform and evolving it to meet the storage needs of future devices.

While the HDD can benefit the average consumer, it’s also geared toward enabling cloud scalability for service providers.

“Toshiba’s new 16TB MG08 Series delivers new levels of storage capacity and density while delivering improved power efficiency for our cloud-scale and storage solutions customers. Only high-density HDD technology can achieve our customers’ critical TCO objectives at a cost of pennies per GB”

This new cutting edge high-storage drive will help lead the hardware charge into the increasingly cloud-focused network infrastructure.

There’s no word yet on pricing, but Toshiba plans on sending the drives to their large customers later on in January.