Toshiba showcases tech that will drive HDD capacities to 30TB

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Toshiba showcases tech that will drive HDD capacities to 30TB

The MG09 series of drives from Toshiba was their first to feature the use of FC-MAMR. Image source: Toshiba.

If you’ve been worried about running out of storage, take heart, Toshiba has showcased its proprietary recording technologies that will take HDD capacities to 30TB by FY2023.

This is especially poignant as demand for storage is again growing as the year has seen Toshiba enjoy a 61% growth in sales of its Exabyte drives driven by demand from Cloud companies.

Yuichi Nanno, Division President, Storage Products Division, Toshiba Electronics Components Taiwan Corporation, said:

Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilise our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers' needs.

Leveraging MAMR

Toshiba's roadmap for HDD capacities. Image source: Toshiba.

The key to increasing HDD capacity lies in increasing the amount of data that can be written and read per unit area.

To solve this, Toshiba plans to leverage its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching – Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), among others, to lift HDD capacities to 30TB and even greater capacities.

MAMR (Microwave-assisted Magnetic Recording) technology, the basic building block of two solutions, allows data to be written at a lower magnetic field, enabling denser, more reliable drives.

FC-MAMR mainly directs more magnetic field flowing from the magnetic recording pole toward the recording media to increase its recording capacity.

The technology was first used in the write head of Toshiba’s MG09 series of 3.5-inch enterprise HDDs targeting cloud-scale storage infrastructure, business-critical servers and storage, and File and Object storage solutions. So far, the capacity of the MG09 series is up to 18TB.

MAS-MAMR is meant to drive capacities beyond this. Toshiba hopes to improve recording density beyond that of FC-MAMR by narrowing the bandwidth used on the plate compared to FC-MAMR, allowing more data to be stored per unit disk space.

The company carried out a demonstration of the technology in partnership with Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) and TDK Corporation (TDK), in December last year confirming its ability to help increase storage capacity.

Toshiba isn’t alone in working towards higher capacity HDDs.

WD is betting on HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording), PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), and MAMR. Seagate is looking into PMR and HAMR (Gen 2).