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Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (Toshiba) has announced the M12 Series of 3.5-inch nearline hard disk drives (HDDs) for hyperscale and cloud service providers operating largeโscale data centres. The new series uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to deliver storage capacities ranging from 30 to 34 TBย (terabytes). Sample shipments have begun and Toshiba also plans to begin sample shipments of M12 drives that use Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) to deliver capacities of up to 28 TB in the third quarter of 2026.
As the manufacturer says, the adoption of cloud services, and increasing use of data-hungry AI and data science, are causing growth in the volumes of data generated and stored.ย The requirement from data centres, the repositories for most of the worldโs digital data, is for higher-capacity, better performing HDDs to support more efficient system configurations. The M12 Series is designed to address this the company says by significantly increasing storage capacity in the standard 3.5-inch nearline HDD form factor.
M12 Series drives use Toshibaโs proprietary design and analysis through the development of slim and compact products. They surpass previous generations (CMR MG11 and SMR MA11 Series) with an additional magnetic disk, bringing the total to 11. The recording media used in the M12 Series replaces the standard aluminum substrate with glass, which offers durability and enables a thinner design. Their enclosures are helium-filled, and the drives combine Toshibaโs proprietary Flux Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (FCโMAMR) with SMR, achieving storage capacities of 30 to 34 TB.
The product firm says SMR increases recording density by overlapping data tracks, much like roof shingles. However, due to data track overlap, random write operations can cause performance degradation. To overcome this, the M12 Series HDDs adopt a host-managed SMR architecture, in which the host system manages data placement and rewriting within the drive.
The new SMR HDDs reach a maximum data transfer rate of 282 MiB/s, an improvement of about 8pc, while power consumption per terabyte (W/TB) is the firm says about 18 per cent lower than that of the previous generation of products. Designed for continuous 24/7 operation, the M12 Series supports an annual workload rating of 550 TB and offers an MTTF/MTBF[6] of 2.5 million hours, an annualised failure rate (AFR) of 0.35 per cent.
Toshiba plans to further increase HDD capacity through the adoption of next-generation recording technologies, including Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), and products featuring a 12-disk configuration. Increasing HDD capacity is key to addressing the constantly growing storage demands of data centres, the firm adds.
Visit: https://www.toshiba-storage.com/.
