Toshiba gets NASty: Soups up hi-cap enterprise drive

9-platter capacity drive modified for NAS use

Toshiba has developed a high-capacity NAS drive from its 10TB and 14TB helium-filled enterprise capacity spinners.

The MN07, derived from the MG07ACA, comes in 10 and 14TB capacities and Toshiba has said it has 9 platters, meaning 1.555TB/platter at 14TB, and is suited for NAS enclosures with 8 or more 3.5-inch bays.

Toshiba MN07 3.5-inch disk drive.

There is little detailed drive-level information available from Tosh, not the cache size, the sequential data transfer rate, the rpm nor the interface. We understand it spins at 7.200rpm and has a 6Gbit/s interface.

The MG07ACA has a 256MiB cache and a 248MiB/s sequential transfer rate, so the MN07 should be in the same ballpark.

Tosh tells us the 14TB model improves power efficiency by approximately 55 per cent over the previous 10TB “air” 7,200rpm mechanical designs.

The MNO7 has workload ratings of up to 180TB per year. It has a 1 million hours MTBF rating and supports up to 300,000 load/unload cycles.

Samples of the product are shipping to OEMs and there is no pricing information.

Seagate and Western Digital are aiming to transition away from conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to, respectively, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) - using heat or microwave energy to assist writing data in more stable magnetic material with smaller bit sizes than is feasible with PMR.

We are watching Toshiba to see which way it jumps as PMR technology runs out of steam.

It will have to develop its recording technology somehow to progress beyond the 14TB capacity point with such 3.5-inch drives. Until then it will probably bring out further market-optimised 12 and 14TB drives, with, possibly, the surveillance and desktop PC markets as examples, ®