What the Byte: Toshiba has announced a new series of hard disk drives designed for data center and enterprise customers. Just in time for World Backup Day, the drives feature significant technological upgrades and a slew of industry acronyms – although a HAMR-based unit has yet to appear.
Toshiba's M12 Series of 3.5-inch drives uses Shingled Magnetic Recording to achieve storage capacities ranging from 30 to 34TB. The Japanese corporation – one of the world's largest HDD manufacturers alongside Seagate and Western Digital – said the new line of drives is specifically designed for hyperscale customers, cloud service providers, and large-scale data center operations.
Toshiba introduced the M12 Series on World Backup Day, emphasizing the importance of regular backups to protect valuable data. The need for backups and larger storage drives is now more critical than ever due to cloud computing, "data-hungry" AI technologies, and the growing demand for video content distribution.
The M12 Series incorporates several of Toshiba's latest technological advancements to improve upon the previous MG11 Series. Most notably, the new drives include an additional magnetic platter, bringing the total to 11. The recording media has replaced the traditional aluminum substrate with glass, offering higher durability and enabling thinner drive designs.
The helium-filled M12 drives are based on Toshiba's proprietary Flux Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording. Combined with SMR, FC-MAMR significantly increases data density, enabling higher storage capacities. MAMR uses high-frequency magnetic fields to achieve results similar to those of laser-based, heat-assisted magnetic recording drives.
Shingled Magnetic Recording can cause performance degradation in certain workloads, which is why Toshiba employs a "host-managed SMR architecture" to mitigate these issues. In this design, the host system determines and manages data placement and rewrite operations, with Toshiba promising enhanced efficiency and performance in server environments.
Toshiba also plans to release new drives using the faster, more reliable Conventional Magnetic Recording technology in the third quarter. However, these CMR drives will offer "limited" storage capacities of up to 28TB.
The M12 Series can reach a maximum data transfer rate of 282MB per second, an 8% improvement over the M11 Series. The drives are designed for continuous operation, supporting an annual workload rating of 550TB. Looking ahead, Toshiba's roadmap includes HAMR drives and larger units with up to 12 platters.
Seagate has already launched its HAMR drives, while Western Digital plans to follow in 2027.