Toshiba has caught up – again – with Seagate and Western Digital by announcing sample shipping of Mx11 family 24 TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and 28 TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives.
Seagate first announced its 24 TB CMR drive, the Exos X24, in October last year. It later added the Exos X28 SMR drive, which was slightly overshadowed by its Exos HAMR announcement in January that highlighted conventional 24 and 30 TB HAMR drives and a 32 TB shingled drive. These are not actually shipping, being in the customer qualification stage. Western Digital started shipping Ultrastar DC HC580 24 TB CMR and DC HC680 28 TB SMR disk drives in November last year. Up until now, Toshiba’s maximum capacity drive has been the MG10F 22 TB CMR, announced in September 2023. There was previously no Toshiba SMR drive in this nearline, mass-capacity class of product.
Larry Martinez-Palomo, Toshiba VP and Head of Storage Products Division, stated: “The Mx11 Series delivers new levels of capacity and total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiency, enabling customers to optimize operational costs while expanding their data center infrastructure.”
A shingled drive is a variant of a normal CMR drive in which there are zones of concentric tracks that partially overlap but still expose the narrower read track. This enables more tracks per platter at the expense of slower zone erase and rewriting compared to CMR’s more granular track-and-block level erase and rewrite.
There are two members of the Mx11 family: the MG11 Series of CMR drives with a 1-24 TB capacity range, and the MA11 Series shingled and host-managed drives with 27 and 28 TB capacities. Both the MA11 and MG11 use Toshiba’s flux control microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. They are 3.5-inch, ten-platter drives rotating at 7,200 rpm inside a helium-filled enclosure.
The Mx11 family is designed with a 1 GiB (1.1 GB) buffer, a 6 Gbps SATA interface, a workload rating of 550 TB per year, an MTTF/MTBF of 2.5 million hours, and an annual failure rate (AFR) of 0.35 percent. There is also a self-encrypting drive option (SED).
The MG11 has 6 Gbps SATA or 12 Gbps SAS interfaces available and the same cache. It has an approximately 9 percent faster maximum sustained transfer speed of 295 MiB/s (309 MBps) than Toshiba’s prior MG10F. This is faster than competing 24 TB CMR drives. Seagate’s Exos X24 does 285 MBps while Western Digital’s Gold 24 does 298 MBps.
The MG11 has a 1.1 GB cache, twice as large as the Seagate and Western Digital drives’ 512 MB, and that will play a part in its speed advantage. It also has a secure instant erase (SIE) option as well as SED.
MG11 sample shipments will start this month, and the MA11 will sample in the fourth calendar quarter.
