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Feeling a bit gassy? Toshiba floats 16TB helium whopper

Nine-platter beast serves up high-capacity spinning rust

Toshiba has promised January sample shipments for its MG08 helium-filled disk drive, which inflates current disk recording technology to a record 16TB capacity.

Rivals Western Digital and Seagate max out at 14TB for normal format drives with the former having an Ultrastar DC HC620 shingled media drive with 15TB capacity. This, with its overlapping write tracks, is not a drop-in replacement for normal, non-shingled drives.

The MG08 spins at 7,200rpm with a 512MB buffer, 4K native and 512e formats. It has a 2.5 million hours mean time between failures rating and a 550TB/year workload rating with 24x7 operation.

Toshiba_MG08

Toshiba MG08 hard disk drive

There are two interfaces: 6Gbit/s SATA and 12Gbit/s SAS. No sequential data transfer rate numbers have yet been divulged.

Toshiba is eyeing customers in the cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premises rack-scale storage area, with applications such as data protection, big data aggregation, content creation and digital archiving.

El Reg expects Seagate and Western Digital to follow suit fairly promptly, not wanting to cede the capacity high ground to Tosh.

MG08 sample ships start later this month. ®

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