Toshiba announces 5TB high-capacity nearline enterprise HDDs

Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) has launched a new range of 7,200 RPM hard disc drives (HDDs) engineered for nearline business-critical workloads. The MG04 series HDDs are available in capacities up to 5TB[1] and are the industry’s first enterprise capacity drives to feature Persistent Write Cache technology. This optional feature enables improved application performance and data-loss protection in the event of unexpected power loss.

The drives provide a 25% increase in maximum capacity and a 24% increase in maximum data rate at outer diameter (OD) compared to previous-generation, MG03 series drives. At a time when businesses are struggling to cope with an explosion of digital data, the higher storage densities will help save server rack space and reduce the footprint of business critical servers and storage systems such as those used in capacity optimized data centres.

Housed in industry standard 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) form factor, the MG04 series drives are available in models that support either 512e or 4Kn advanced format storage modes. The 4Kn drives offer optimum performance and compatibility with the latest applications and operating environments. The 512e compatible drives provide support for legacy applications and operating environments that require 512byte sector lengths.

Equipped with either 6Gb/s SAS (MG04SCA) or 6Gb/s SATA (MG04ACA) interfaces, the MG04 series can also be supplied with Toshiba’s Sanitize Instant Erase (SIE) functionality.

“Cloud storage and data centre operators are facing a boom in demand for data storage capacity, driving increased demand for nearline storage drives,” said Martin Larsson, Vice President, Toshiba Electronics Europe, Storage Products Division. “The MG04 nearline series perfectly balances capacity and performance to enable data centres and cloud storage providers to meet the demand for increased storage capacity while minimizing rack space requirements.”