Toshiba is announcing that it has started sampling of its latest MG07SCA-series enterprise-class helium-filled hard drives. Notable for utilizing a dual-port SAS interface, the HDDs are aimed at business-critical servers and are rated for 550 TB per year workloads.

Toshiba’s MG07SCA lineup of enterprise-grade hard drive includes two SKUs at 12 TB and 14 TB respectively. The flagship 14 TB model relies on nine PMR platters from Showa Denko with ~1.56 TB capacity each, whereas the 12 TB model relies on eight platters. Both HDDs feature a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 256 MB cache buffer, and a dual-port SAS 12 Gbps interface. Just like their SATA brethren, the new SAS hard drives are based on Toshiba’s latest-gen helium-filled platform for business-critical HDDs with all the possible enhancements to improve reliability and durability, including top and bottom attached motors, RVFF, environmental sensors, and so on.

The MG07SCA-series HDDs also support Toshiba’s proprietary feature for enterprise-grade hard drives — a persistent write cache (PWC) with power loss protection (PLP), which is particularly important for 4K sector drives that emulate 512B sectors. The PWC with PLP capability protects data in case of power loss while performing read-modify-write (RMW) operation to align the source write request with the physical sectors it has to modify.

When it comes to performance, the MG07SCA drives offer exactly the same specs as their SATA counterparts. The top-of-the-range 14 TB HDD is speced for a 260 MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate, whereas the 12 TB model is slightly slower at around 250 MB/s. Toshiba says that the new SAS hard drives can perform up to 167 read IOPS, and, up to 70 write IOPS (4 KB blocks) when subject to random accesses. As for power, the HDDs consume up to 7.8 W – 8.28 W during random reads and writes depending on the model.

As noted above, Toshiba’s MG07SCA HDDs are aimed at business-critical workloads and are therefore rated for 550 TB average annualized workload, 2.5 million hours MTBF, and are covered with a standard five-year warranty.

Brief Specifications of Toshiba's MG07SCA HDDs
Capacity 14 TB 12 TB
P/N 4Kn MG07SCA14TA MG07SCA12TA
4Kn SIE MG07SCA14TAY MG07SCA12TAY
512e MG07SCA14TE MG07SCA12TE
512e SIE MG07SCA14TEY MG07SCA12TEY
Platters 9 8
Heads 18 16
Recording Technology Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) / Conventional
RPM 7200 RPM
Interface Dual Port SAS 12 Gbps
DRAM Cache 256 MB
Persistent Write Cache Yes
Helium-Filling Yes
Sequential Data Transfer Rate (host to/from drive) 260 MB/s ~250 MB/s
MTBF 2.5 million
Rated Annual Workload 550 TB
Acoustics (Active Idle) 20 dB
Power Consumption Random read/write 8.28 W 7.8 W
Idle 4.73 W 4.36 W
Warranty 5 Years

Toshiba did not reveal prices of its MG07SCA-series hard drives or when its direct customers intend to start offering them to end users (i.e., operators of datacenters). In general, pricing of such drives depends on the volume ordered, whereas qualification of HDDs for business-critical applications usually takes from months to quarters depending on various factors.

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Source: Toshiba

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  • HStewart - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    I am curious how the dual SAS interface is use - is this for performance and double transfer - or the crazy idea to work redundant servers or such.
  • HStewart - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    Just FYI, I have dual 36G 15000 rpm SAS drives on my Supermicro - setup original as Raid 0.

    If these SAS were setup for performance in dual configuration, I am also curious what a Dual SAS SSD drive would be like.
  • romrunning - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    Dual-port SAS drives are used both for fault-tolerance (i.e. HBA/port failure, still has access through other port) and the ability to be device addressable by different storage controllers.
  • HStewart - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link

    That sounds logical for fault-tolerance. My supermicro has hot swappable drives and such and this would take it to next level
  • piroroadkill - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link

    Dual SAS is entirely for redundancy - all storage arrays worth anything whatsoever have two controllers, that can fail over from one to the other. Dual ports mean that every disk always has a path to both controllers at all times.
  • prime2515103 - Sunday, September 9, 2018 - link

    The chart says the interface is "SATA 6 Gps."
  • s.yu - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link

    Never got these helium drives, the gas is inevitably gonna leak. That sounds bad.
  • Foeketijn - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link

    The helium has nowhere to go. You are right that helium has the tendency to escape. But the other gasses need to replace it. And of course the enclosure is gas proof with an under pressure I asume.
    Yes it is leaking kind of per definition. It won't empty itself (and become near vacuum) in the warranty period. Probably in the order of hundreds of years.

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