Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corp., subsidiary of Toshiba of Japan, has launched its latest innovation—a storage drive that has gotten the industry’s attention with the world’s first enterprise conventional magnetic recording to reach 14-terabytes, the first with nine disks and filled with helium, thereby reducing energy consumption.
Toshiba said in a statement that helium was the key to the innovation. The second lightest gas, it lowered disk resistance, improved performance and contributed to the capacity increase. It also helped improve power consumption by over 40 percent compared to previous models.
Masafumi Fujimori of Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corp.’s’s HDD sales and marketing division said the new product has received a strong response from popular technology analysts and the company is targeting data centers as its main market.
“We will develop the market in China, and in small data centers, and, of course, the hyper-scale data centers in the US. Progress in big data is driving an information explosion, and we will have to continue to develop HDD with larger capacities, because data center companies tend to demand the HDD that have the highest capacity at any given time,” Fujimori said.
He said the new 14TB HDD has captured the industry’s attention because it is the world’s first CMR drive with nine disks, and it delivers 14TB capacity and the first Toshiba HDD to replace air with helium.
Sato Takumi of the HDD products engineering department said squeezing nine disks into a hard drive increases capacity .
“Before this, our largest capacity drive was a 7-disk, 10TB model. The most any other company has achieved so far is eight disks. If you want to mount nine disks in the same housing as an 8-disk drive, it is crucial to scale down parts and eliminate variations in parts. The HDD must also pass strict shock and vibration resistance tests, to confirm reliability. We were able to resolve these problems with know-how and experience we gained in developing 0.85-inch and 1.8-inch HDD,” Takumi said.