Finally! Toshiba launches its first 22TB hard drive — while Seagate and WD race towards 30TB
Toshiba has announced a new 22TB model, the MG10F, almost a year after it unveiled its last flagship 20TB hard drive. The release comes almost half a year after Seagate’s own 22TB drive and over a year after Western Digital.
As expected, it’s an incremental improvement over the previous product, increasing drive capacity from 2TB to 2.2TB; the design still uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDD with the company’s mature 10-drive helium-sealed technology.
Aimed at the business market, it offers a whopping 512 MB cache, is available with SAS and SATA interfaces and comes with a five-year warranty. According to Blocks and filesshould perform similarly to its competitors, with a sustained data transfer rate of 284 MB/s compared to 291 MB/s for Western Digital’s 22TB Gold and 285 MB/s for Seagate’s 22TB IronWolf Pro drive.
No pricing has been announced yet, but considering the 20TB model retails for around $350 in the US and 22TB models from Seagate and Western Digital can be had for as little as $410, I don’t see Toshiba charging a significant premium brings for his product. Expect Toshiba to offer this higher capacity in its external hard drives and in its X300 and N300 product ranges for PC clients and NAS devices respectively.
Looking ahead, all three storage companies have plans to move to shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in the future, something that makes sense for enterprise/datacenter/hyperscale/nearline, but not really for consumers. Western Digital has already launched a 26TB drive, the Ultrastar DCHC670but end users can’t buy it because it’s a host-managed SMR (more on that in our interview with WD’s Ravi Pendekanti, SVP HDD Product Management).
Seagate has confirmed that it has shipped samples of 32TB hard drives using HAMR (heat-assisted Magnetic Recording) technology to Western Digital, confirming that 28TB HDDs are already in the hands of customers, albeit in the testing phase. Additionally, we would be looking at 50TB hard drives by the end of this decade