Toshiba announced that it has joined the ranks of storage vendors offering 6 TB HDDs. The new 6 TB model adds on to the existing MC04 family, which already features capacities of 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB. The MC04 family is geared for high-capacity applications such as bulk data storage systems, but its 7200 RPM spindle speed also delivers the performance required for more intense environments, such as cloud-based applications and scale-out workloads.
The 6 TB MC04 comes in the standard 3.5″ form factor and employs five platters. The bump in capacity is a 20 percent increase over the previous generation’s 5 TB, yet it has the same power consumption. Adding in more capacity while maintaining the same power consumption characteristics increases the all-important Watts-per-GB metric.
The MC04 series comes with the SATA interface and is spec’d for a 180 TB workload per year. The MTBF rating of 10 per 10E14 is the same as the 1 per 10E15 rating of competing drives in this segment (such as the Seagate Terascale), and the MC04 also features the same 800,000 hour MTBF. The sustained data transfer rate spans from 170 MiB/s to 140 MiB/s from the outer portions of the track to the inner portions, and the average latency is measured at 4.17 ms.
“Today’s cloud-based infrastructures require cost-effective, increased storage capacity,” said Scott Wright, director of disk drive product marketing at Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit. “With up to 6 TB capacity and 7200 RPM performance, the Toshiba MC04 Series delivers an optimized balance of enterprise capacity, workload, and performance required by our customers’ high data growth cloud use-cases.”
The move to a 6 TB capacity point is important for Toshiba to remain within reach of its competitors. The migration to larger capacities begins with the SATA version geared for the mainstream section of the market, but Toshiba will surely be releasing other 6 TB versions into the remainder of its product stack soon.
The new 6 TB MC04 Series will begin sampling in August 2015.
