Toshiba Announces 18TB MG09 HDD

Toshiba is preparing to release their new HDD models, which will be their first with “energy-assisted magnetic recording”. The new MG09 Series of drives employ their 3rd generation 9-disk helium-sealed design, allowing a staggering 2TB per disk in the stack. The end result is a “humble” 3.5″ HDD that can hold a staggering 18 TB!

This isn’t the biggest upgrade ever, as they’ve already got some impressive 16TB models on the market. However, it’s not easy to cram more and more data into the same form factor. A 12.5% increase in capacity year-on-year is excellent though, and given that the largest drive I personally own is a 6TB, it’s clear that things have come a long way in just a few years.

The MG09 is adapted to mixed random and sequential read and write workloads in both cloud-scale and traditional data center use cases. The MG09 features 7,200rpm performance, a 550 TB per year workload rating, and a choice of SATA and SAS interfaces—all in a power-efficient helium-sealed industry-standard, 3.5-inch form factor.

That doesn’t mean to say that consumers like you and I won’t be able to reap their benefits, of course. However, they’re broadly aimed at enterprise and large businesses where space is money. However, I’ve got a big fat Plex server and a growing arcade game backup library that wouldn’t mind a couple of these snuggled in my two-bay NAS.

What Toshiba Had to Say

“Toshiba’s new 18 TB MG09 Series delivers new levels of storage density and power efficiency to our cost-conscious cloud-scale and storage solutions customers. Our HDD technology is able to achieve our customers’ critical TCO objectives at a cost of pennies per GB,” said Shuji Takaoka, General Manager of the Storage Products Sales & Marketing Division at Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. “Our 3rd generation 9-disk helium-sealed design provides a field-tested foundation for achieving a massive 18 TB capacity. The addition of Toshiba’s innovative FC-MAMR technology advances CMR capacity to 18 TB, delivering compatibility with the widest range of applications and operating environments.”

Price and Availability

Sample shipments of 18 TB MG09 Series HDD to customers are expected to start sequentially at the end of March 2021. No word on pricing just yet, but you can bet your whole wallet it’ll be expensive. For more information, visit this page.