Toshiba Increases Hard Disk Drive Capacity To 4TB

Although it often seems like it, storage hardware news isn’t always about solid-state development.

Old-school hard-disk drives, which have been around and doing yeoman’s work since IBM invented them in 1956, also make their share of news – especially when it comes to capacity improvements.

Large-capacity drives

Toshiba’s storage products business unit has introduced four new large-capacity nearline hard-disk drives, including the first self-encrypting models in the company’s enterprise capacity-optimised storage lineup.

The 3.5-inch 7,200 rpm MG Series includes both Serial ATA (SATA) – the MG03ACA400 and the MG03ACA400Y – and SAS models – MG03SCA400 and the MG03SCP400 – and all of them hold 4TB of storage, the company’s largest capacity to date.

Large-capacity HDDs are becoming more strategic for IT systems designed to organise and access ever-growing pools of business information – from humans and machines. The massive capacity of the MG Series is aimed at conventional RAID storage and arrays, tiered virtual infrastructures for public and private cloud deployments, archives, and disk-based backup and data protection solutions, Toshiba said.

The new HDDs are designed specifically for network-attached storage (NAS), storage-area networks (SAN) and tiered storage deployments inside large enterprises, as well as for direct-attached storage in general-purpose servers and systems and applications oriented toward small and midsize businesses, Toshiba said.

Faster transfer rate

The new 3.5-inch, 4TB models also feature an 18 percent increase in sustained transfer rates for both the SATA and SAS interface versions, Toshiba claimed. In addition, the MG Series includes power-management features designed to reduce power consumption during off-peak activity periods.

The optional SATA self-encrypting (SED) models support secure cryptographic-erase using both the latest T13 SANITIZE crypto-scramble protocol and the older T13 ATA Security Erase command protocol.

Sample shipments of the MG 4TB series models will start later in December, with volume shipments scheduled to begin early next year, Toshiba said. Go here for more information.

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Originally published on eWeek.