Toshiba Demonstrates Nearline HDD With 30TB+ Capacities

The race to advance HDD technology never ends, and while I remember my first 3.5″ HDD was 512MB, and actually, my first custom-built PC had 2 x 6GB drives and friends thought I was “crazy!” getting so much storage… but alas, here I am today with over 100TB and still need more.

Well, Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation (Toshiba) has successfully achieved storage capacities of over 30 TB with two next-generation large-capacity recording technologies for hard disk drives (HDDs): Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR).

While it’s unlikely we’ll see these hitting the consumer market too soon, any increase in storage density is going to have huge appeal in the enterprise markets first. I wouldn’t mind a few 30TB drives though, given that a six-bay NAS could then hold up to 180TB is just mind-blowing to me.

HAMR

HAMR, one of the two technologies that are driving forward next-generation high-capacity data recording, boosts magnetic recording capabilities by locally heating the disk with near-field light. Toshiba achieved 32 TB on 10 disks and adoption of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. Toshiba plans to start shipping test sample HDDs with HAMR technology in 2025.

MAMR

The other technology is MAMR, which uses microwaves to enhance magnetic recording capabilities. Toshiba was the first to demonstrate its effectiveness and started mass production of first-generation drives in 2021. Toshiba achieved 31 TB by stacking 11 disks, utilizing SMR technology, and improving signal processing.

These new achievements were made possible through years of close collaborative work with Resonac Corporation, a HDD media manufacturer, and TDK Corporation, a HDD head manufacturer. Toshiba and its working partners are committed to continue developing both HAMR and MAMR technologies in order to provide higher capacity HDDs to meet the growing storage demand of the cloud and data centres.

A technical lecture detailing the demonstration will be presented at the IDEMA Symposium scheduled for May 16.