October, 2021

Toshiba Unveils World's First FC-MAMR HDD

Hard Drive Recovery Toshiba MG09

Toshiba has announced the industry’s first hard drives that feature flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. The new MG09-series HDDs are designed primarily for  enterprise applications, and they offer an 18 TB capacity along with a low idle power consumption.

The Toshiba MG09-series 3.5-inch 18 TB MG09ACA18TE HDD are based on the company’s nine-platter helium sealed platform that features 18 heads with a microwave-emitting component. This component changes magnetic coercivity of the platters before writing data. Each aluminum platter is about 0.635 mm thick. It features an areal density of around 1.5 Tb/inch2 and can store up to 2 TB of data. The MG09 family also includes a 16 TB model which presumably features a lower number of platters.

Toshiba's MG09-series drives use a motor with a 7200-RPM spindle speed and they are also equipped with a 512 MB buffer. The new HDDs are rated for a 281 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate. Toshiba has not updated the random access performance of the new products, although it’s likely that their per-TB IOPS performance is lower when compared to predecessors. The manufacturer’s new drives will be offered both with SATA 3.3 (6 Gbps) and SAS 3.0 (12 Gbps) interfaces as well as a selection of logical data block length.

The MG09 hard drives are intended for datacenter racks that accommodate hundreds of vibrating HDDs, so they feature multiple enhancements to ensure consistent performance, reliability, and durability. Such enhancements include top and bottom attached motors, RVFF, and environmental sensors. Like all modern drives for 24/7 applications, Toshiba’s MG09-series units are rated for a 550 TB average annualized workload, 2.5 million hours MTBF, and are covered with a standard five-year warranty.

The new MG09 HDDs also support Toshiba’s persistent write cache (PWC) with power loss protection (PLP) technology that guards data in case of power loss. It also performs read-modify-write (RMW) operation to align the source write request with the physical sectors it has to modify. Also, the new MG09 family includes Sanitize Instant Erase (SIE) and Self Encrypting Drive (SED) models.

But no matter how good the new Toshiba FC-MAMR HDDs are, they can also fall victim to physical and logical hard drive failures. If that happens, their owners will need to contact a professional data recovery services provider to get their data back. ACE Data Recovery team can successfully recover data from all types of storage media and is ready to help the Toshiba FC-MAMR HDD owners with their data recovery needs.