Toshiba unveils a 16 TB hard drive — the industry's largest so far
Toshiba has just unveiled the MG08 hard drive, which is the industry's largest hard drive with a capacity of 16 TB. The only problem is that the new drive is targeted at cloud and data center environments and we cannot tell yet if it will also be available to the general public or not.
According to Toshiba, the new MG08 delivers — in addition to its impressive capacity — an improved level of power efficiency thanks to the use of a 9-disk helium design. This design was introduced last year in 14 TB hard drives, alongside an advanced precision laser welding process to keep the helium sealed inside the drive case.
In addition to the above, we should mention the following details: 7,200 rpm speed, 512 MB buffer, 2.5 million-hour MTTF, 550 TB per year workload, 3.5-inch form factor and a choice of SATA and SAS interfaces.
The first samples of 16 TB Toshiba MG08 drives will be shipped to customers at the end of this month. Since there is no word on pricing and general retail availability yet, we can only hope and wait for now.
