Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH announces that Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation (Toshiba) has successfully achieved storage capacities of over 30TB with two next-generation large-capacity magnetic recording technologies for hard disk drives (HDDs): Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR). The demonstration drives represent a major milestone in the advance towards commercial products based on each of these emerging recording formats.

HAMR boosts writing capabilities by locally heating the disk material with a near-field laser. Toshiba achieved 32TB on 10 disks using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) – a technology that partially overlaps data tracks to increase the areal density and overall storage capacity per disk. Toshiba plans to start shipping test sample HDDs[2] of 28 – 30TB with HAMR technology in 2025. The other technology is MAMR, which uses microwaves to enhance magnetic recording capabilities.

Toshiba was the first to demonstrate its effectiveness and started mass production of first-generation drives in 2021. Toshiba achieved 31TB capacity by stacking 11 disks, using SMR technology, and improving signal processing. These new achievements were made possible through years of close collaborative work with Resonac Corporation, an HDD media manufacturer, and TDK Corporation, an HDD head manufacturer.

Toshiba and its working partners are committed to continue developing both HAMR and MAMR technologies in order to provide higher capacity HDDs to meet the growing storage demand of the cloud and data centres. As Larry Martinez-Palomo, Vice President, Head of Storage Products Division at Toshiba, explains, “Toshiba is concurrently advancing the development of future generation high capacity HDDs using both HAMR and MAMR technologies. Mass production of hard disk drives incorporating HAMR will commence after the validation phase is completed. In the interim, Toshiba will continue to satisfy the demand for high-capacity, high-reliability storage devices with hard disk drives employing the field-proven MAMR technology.”

At ISC High Performance 2024, May 12th to 16th in Hamburg, Germany, Toshiba and its partners discussed with experts, how its hard disk drive technologies and enterprise portfolio are streamlined to meet the needs of large and fast online backend storage. On the stand (G02), there were live demos showing the astonishing performance of Toshiba’s HDD MG Series.

Toshiba Gulf FZE Dubai, UAE has announced the launch of the MG10 Series in the MEA region, a massive capacity 20TB HDD with the conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology. The 20TB MG10 Series has a 10-disk helium-sealed design that leverages Toshiba’s innovative Flux Control Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR) technology to boost storage capabilities.

With 11.1% more capacity than Toshiba’s prior 18TB model, 20TB MG10 Series are compatible with the widest range of applications and operating systems and are adapted to mixed random and sequential read and write workloads in both cloud-scale and traditional data-center use cases. The drive features 7,200rpm performance, a 550TB per year workload rating, and a choice of SATA and SAS interfaces—all in a power-efficient helium-sealed, industry-standard 3.5-inch form factor.

The 20TB MG10 Series further illustrates Toshiba’s commitment to advancing HDD design to meet evolving needs for storage devices in cloud-scale servers and object and file storage infrastructure. With its improved power efficiency and increased capacity, the 20TB MG10 Series helps cloud-scale infrastructure to advance storage density, thereby reducing Capex and improving the total cost of ownership (TCO).

As data growth continues at an explosive pace, the advanced 20TB MG10 Series with FC-MAMR technology will help cloud-scale service providers and storage solution designers to achieve higher storage densities for cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-premises rack-scale storage. The 20TB MG10 Series will be available in the region from Jan 2023.

WD’s new My Passport SSD is a gorgeous-looking external SSD storage device that offers storage capacities ranging between 256GB to 2TB. The variant we have reviewed here is the 1TB version that comes in very distinct greyish-silver and black colour tones. While the drive is USB Type-C and USB 3.1 Gen 2 read, it is also compatible with USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and USB-A ports.

Inside the box, you get the WD My Passport SSD drive, a USB Type-C to Type-C cable, a Type-C to Type-A adapter, a quick start guide, and the warranty info. Outside the box, the drive comes preformatted with exFAT, for compatibility with Windows and Mac. On paper, the drive offers fast read speeds of up to 540 MB/s, thanks to the USB 3.1 Gen 2 bus, which is also known as USB 3.1.

The drive measures ‎8.89-by-4.57-by-0.99 cm in dimension and weighs around 40.82-gms. The drive also offers hardware encryption. So, you can set a password to help keep it protected with built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption with WD Security software. In addition, it can also withstand drops from a height of up to 6.5-feet.

On paper, the drive offers data transfer speeds of up to 540 MB/s. In order to test its performance, we ran two benchmarks on it – CrystalDiskMark 8 and ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.0.1. On CrystalDiskMark, we were able to clock a sequential read speed of 462 MB/s and a write speed of 461 MB/s. On ATTO Disk Benchmark, we clocked a read speed of 432 MB/s and a write speed of 440 MB/s.

Since it is an SSD drive, there are no moving parts and hence it is less susceptible to over-heating and data corruption issues.
For a price of AED 700, the WD My Passport SSD (1TB) is a very lightweight external storage device that does its job as advertised.

Price: AED 700