Toshiba Announces Its First 18 TB Hard Disk Drives Enabled by Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording

Japanese storage giant Toshiba will release its biggest hard drives yet in the form of the 18 TB MG09 Series. The company shared the news in a press release published today, which confirmed that the new 3.5-inch HDDs feature the company’s third-gen, nine-disk helium-sealed design and innovative Flux Control – Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR) technology to boost Conventional Magnetic Recording densities from 16 TB to 18 TB. In terms of performance, the HDDs feature a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM, a data transfer speed of 268 MiB/s, and a 550 TB per year workload rating.

“With its improved power efficiency and 18TB capacity, the MG09 Series helps cloud-scale infrastructure advance storage density to reduce capex and improve TCO (total cost of ownership),” Toshiba noted in its press release. “As data growth continues at an explosive pace, advanced 18TB MG09 with FC-MAMR technology will help cloud-scale service providers and storage solution designers achieve higher storage densities for cloud, hybrid-cloud and on-premises rack-scale storage.”

“Toshiba’s new 18TB MG09 Series delivers new levels of storage density and power efficiency to our cost-conscious cloud-scale and storage solutions customers,” said Shuji Takaoka, General Manager of the Storage Products Sales & Marketing Division at Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation. Our HDD technology is able to achieve our customers’ critical TCO objectives at a cost of pennies per GB.”

Toshiba will begin sending out sample shipments of its new 18 TB MG09 Series hard drives to customers at the end of March 2021. The lineup comprises six 18 TB models and six 16 TB models, all of which include a choice of either SATA 6.0 Gbit/s or 12.0 Gbit/s SAS Interfaces.

MG09 Series Specifications

MG09 Series Lineup