The market for mechanical hard drives is moribund, with sales falling year after year. Despite this trend, hard drive manufacturers continue to develop new, higher-capacity drives. Toshiba has just announced its new HDD of the MG10 range, which has a capacity of 20 TB.
Mechanical hard disk drives or HDDs have been relegated to the business segment and for mass storage in NAS. But they are also losing steam in these markets with the arrival of higher capacity SSDs, among other factors. So we don’t know how long HDDs will last, but for now, they refuse to go away.
Toshiba announces its 20TB mechanical hard drive
Although the market for these storage units is declining, solutions continue to be launched. Western Digital released their 20TB drives about a year ago and Seagate released them in March of this year. Toshiba, therefore, lags quite a bit behind its competitors when it comes to 20 TB HDDs.
Regarding the specifications, this unit is based on 10 disks of 2 TB capacity each, spinning at 7200 RPM. The internal chamber is made of helium , which offers less resistance and friction than air and allows the space between the discs to be reduced. These drives arrive with either a 12 Gbps SAS interface or a 6 Gbps SATA 3 interface to meet all customer needs.
It maintains a conventional magnetic recording (CMR) type disk surface. To increase the capacity, this flow-controlled microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology is combined.
On performance, these drives will have a 512 MB cache to improve performance. Thanks to this, a maximum continuous transfer speed of 281 MB/s can be achieved. We must say that SATA SSDs usually offer speeds of 500 MB/s, which is almost double.
These units will begin to be available for the business sector in this last quarter of the year. Although they will reach the general market, they will take a long time. To say that these drives offer a 5-year warranty with an annual write capacity of 550TB. Also note that Toshiba is expected to launch 26TB HDDs this quarter, although there may be delays.
A difficult problem to solve
We must say that the problem with HDDs is precisely in the technology they use. They are based on disks that are recorded by a head that has the ability to write them and read the information they store. The problem is precisely in the disks and the head, which are mechanical moving parts that slow down the operation a lot.
Manufacturers look for ways to make them faster, but it’s complicated. Work is done on parallel writing of the data on the different disks to improve performance. This for practical purposes would be to split the data and write it on all the plates. While it would be effective for write speeds, it might slow down the write, even a data table might be necessary.
Another of the mechanisms used to improve performance, as we see in the Toshiba unit, is to use cache. Large capacity RAM memory chips are normally used to temporarily store data. This intermediate step before definitively storing the data allows for a significant increase in write speeds.