Toshiba’s 14 TB HDDs Now Available from Supermicro
by Anton Shilov on July 13, 2018 8:00 AM EST
Toshiba was the first maker of hard drives to announce a PMR-based 14 TB HDD last December and apparently it is the first company to start their commercial shipments. As of this week, Supermicro has qualified Toshiba’s MG07-series HDDs with 12 TB and 14 TB capacities for use on select storage server platforms and is now offering the appropriate systems to customers. In addition to servers, the drives will be available from Supermicro’s online store eventually.
Toshiba’a MG07 enterprise-grade helium-filled HDDs featuring 14 TB and 12 TB capacities rely on nine and eight PMR platters respectively from Showa Denko, with ~1.56 TB capacity per platter. The drives feature a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 256 MB cache buffer, and a SATA 6 Gbps interface, which is in line with other HDDs for nearline storage applications. Power consumption of Toshiba’s 14 TB hard drive does not exceed 7.6 W, so it is drop-in compatible with virtually all backplanes and servers, but makers of such equipment still need to qualify the drives with their products to ensure their fine operation. Just like other enterprise-grade HDDs, Toshiba’s 12 TB and 14 TB offerings feature enhancements to improve their durability and reliability, including top and bottom attached motors, RVFF, environmental sensor, and so on.
Supermicro has qualified Toshiba’s MG07-series drives with a number of its SuperStorage (SSG) systems, including its top-of-the-range SSG-6049P-E1CR45H/SSG-6049P-E1CR45L 4U machines based on two Intel Xeon Scalable processors with up to 56 cores in total and supporting up to 45 hot-swap 3.5-inch HDDs and up to six NVMe SSDs (connected to PCIe lanes). When fully populated with Toshiba’s 14 TB hard drives, such servers can store 630 TB of data on HDDs and terabytes more on flash drives. Customers interested in maximum HDD storage density can now order SuperStorage machines equipped with Toshiba’s 14 TB HDDs from Supermicro.
| Brief Specifications of Toshiba's MG07ACA HDDs | |||||
| Capacity | 14 TB | 12 TB | |||
| P/N | 4K Native | MG07ACA14TA | MG07ACA12TA | ||
| 512e | MG07ACA14TE | MG07ACA12TE | |||
| Platters | 9 | 8 | |||
| Heads | 18 | 16 | |||
| Recording Technology | Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) / Conventional | ||||
| RPM | 7200 RPM | ||||
| Interface | SATA 6 Gbps | ||||
| DRAM Cache | 256 MB | ||||
| Persistent Write Cache | Yes | ||||
| Helium-Filling | Yes | ||||
| Sequential Data Transfer Rate (host to/from drive) | 260 MB/s | ~250 MB/s | |||
| MTBF | 2.5 million | ||||
| Rated Annual Workload | 550 TB | ||||
| Acoustics (Seek) | unknown | ||||
| Power Consumption | Random read/write | 7.6 W | ? W | ||
| Idle | 4.6 W | ? W | |||
| Warranty | 5 Years | ||||
Toshiba’s MG07-series hard drives are rated for 550 TB average annualized workloads, 2.5 million hours MTBF, and are covered with a five-year warranty. With this level of reliability, it is not surprising that the drives are rather expensive. German retailer sysGen.de charges €619 w/VAT ($725) for a 14 TB version and at press time was the only company in the world to offer this HDD (this does not mean it has the drives in stock). Meanwhile, per-drive prices from Supermicro will depend on volumes and other factors.
Related Reading
Source: Toshiba
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Lolimaster - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Manufacturers are just lazy to add more MLC nand like 16-32GB and at least a software that let's you pick which files should be mirrored to the nand portion. It woulf work better than re-learning your usage pattern every few days. ReplyPeachNCream - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Probably a bad idea given the low number of P/E cycles of current QLC and the high number of write operations a disk cache is likely to absorb. ReplyLolimaster - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Dunno why it's so difficult to include more dram cache, at least 512MB/1GB for drives 4TB and up. Replyadr0106 - Sunday, July 15, 2018 - link
There is simply no benefit. Cache is created to optimize data transfer from the system to media. The size increase of modern HDDs is reached by adding multiple platters. Still reading / writing operations are done to one platter / one side of it at a time. This is why sequential transfer rate is not changing with the size increases within one HDD generation.Caches are adjusted only when platter density allows faster speed. Otherwise you will just put lots of data into a cache that will be waiting for being written to media and take a risk that it disappears due to power loss. Reply