Toshiba goes glassy-eyed with 11-platter 34TB SMR drive

Toshiba is sampling 30 to 34 TB SMR disc drives aimed at hyper scales and cloud service providers.

This MG12 disc drive holds 6 TB more than Toshiba’s current 10-platter MA11 SMR product with its 28TB maximum capacity. The MG12’s areal density is 3.09 TB/platter, which would only provide a 31 TB SMR drive at the 10-platter level. The extra platter takes capacity up to 34 TB, which is still less than the capacities provided by its much bigger rivals, Seagate and Western Digital.

Toshiba is using glass rather than aluminum platters, as glass ones are thinner, and enable more platters to be packed inside the drive’s helium-filled enclosure, thus increasing capacity.

 SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) partially overlaps disk drive data recording tracks to increase capacity more than conventional magnetic recording (CMR), non-shingled drives, by around 15 percent. Western Digital has already moved to 11-platter drives and currently supplies 28TB CMR and 32 TB SMR nearline products.

Seagate is the areal density leader with 44 TB, 10-platter SMR drives using its HAMR tech, being supplied to hyperscalers. They have a 4.4TB/platter areal density, more than 40 percent better than Toshiba, which says it will introduce its own HAMR tech drives, with 12-platters, in upcoming quarters. 

HAMR technology enables far higher areal densities than the current PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) used by both Toshiba and Western Digital. They have both enhanced this by enhancing PMR to support smaller bit areas and thus increased areal density. Western Digital has its ePMR technology while Toshiba's version is called FC-MAMR. Both are reaching their limits in terms of areal density growth, and so both Toshiba and Western Digital are moving to to HAMR tech.

Western Digital is qualifying its next-generation 30 TB CMR and 40 TB SMR drives, using ePMR, and intends to adopt HAMR for these capacity levels as well, and the generation beyond that to smooth its customers’ migration to HAMR drives. Toshiba plans to introduce next-generation HAMR products and 12-platter configurations in upcoming quarters.

The M12 is a nearline drive with, we understand, a 12 Gbits per sec SAS or 6 Gbits per sec SATA interface, and 7200 rpm spin speed. The SMR data placement is managed by the host system. These drives are intended for 24 x 7 use, support a 550TB/year workload, and have a MTTF/MTBF of 2.5 million hours with AFR of 0.35 percent. The M12’s maximum sustained transfer rate is 282 MiB/sec (295.7 MB/s) and Toshiba says its power consumption efficiency per terabyte (W/TB) is approximately 18 percent lower than previous generations. 

Toshiba plans to begin sample shipments of CMR M12 models with capacities up to 28TB in the third quarter of 2026.