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Toshiba ships capacity-optimized 8 TB HDD

Toshiba has started volume shipments of its MG Series 8 TB HDD — the largest capacity-optimized, 3.5-inch enterprise HDD the company has ever produced.

The 7,200 rpm, 6 Gbps SATA HDD improves sustained transfer-rate performance by 12% over the prior MG04ACA model, according to Toshiba. The vendor said the capacity and performance characteristics of the new MG05ACA800 8 TB HDD would match up well for use cases such as public and private cloud deployments, digital archives and data protection.

The new capacity-optimized enterprise 8 TB HDD is designed for round-the-clock operation and has a workload rating of 550 total TB transferred per year, according to Toshiba. The vendor said the MG05ACA800 is the first Toshiba enterprise capacity HDD to support a new industry-standard host-initiated power-disable feature to improve device management. The 8 TB HDD also supports Toshiba Persistent Write Cache technology to protect against data loss in the event of a sudden power outage.

John Rydning, research vice president for HDDs at International Data Corp. (IDC), said the new capacity-optimized 3.5-inch 8 TB HDD is important for Toshiba to be able to compete with Seagate and Western Digital in the enterprise HDD market. Seagate and Western Digital already ship 3.5-inch 8 TB enterprise drives.

IDC predicts 8 TB capacity drives will have the highest shipment volume this year in the capacity-optimized HDD segment. IDC expects the petabyte demand for capacity-optimized 3.5-inch HDDs will grow by more than 40% in 2017 compared to 2016, according to Rydning.

Toshiba also sells 6 Gbps and 12 Gbps SAS “enterprise performance” 2.5-inch HDDs, at rotation speeds of 15,000 rpm and 10,500 rpm. Other enterprise options include capacity-optimized 12 Gbps SAS 3.5-inch HDDs, at 7,200 rpm, and cloud-targeted 6 Gbps SATA 3.5-inch HDDs, at 7,200 rpm.

Earlier this year, Toshiba launched a new line of 3.5-inch MN Series HDDs — at capacities of 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB — to try to bridge the gap between its high-end enterprise capacity HDDs and entry-level desktop HDDs. The 7,200 rpm, 6 Gbps SATA MN Series HDDs MN Series HDDs target mid-level, entry-level and small office NAS enclosures; remote and home office backup and archival storage; and fixed-content object storage, according to Toshiba.

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