The drive is a 3.5-inch storage unit that heads the MC04ACA series

May 22, 2014 09:27 GMT  ·  By

Most HDDs run at 5,400 rotations per minute (RPM), but there are faster ones, even if they do cost more. Toshiba has just revealed such an HDD, called MC04ACA and featuring a platter speed of 7,200 RPM.

By themselves, the various "assets" of the latest Toshiba hard disk drive storage unit don't exactly stand out so much.

7,300 RPM speed is pretty good, but not the best that can be found on the enterprise sector, where even 10K RPM drives exist.

Also, the 5 TB capacity is rare, but not as rare as 6 TB, like on those recent Seagate HDDs. Although, admittedly, 6 TB HDDs have existed for a very short time, so they don't count so much.

What stands out is that the new Toshiba HDD is very capacious and fast, while also using the Advanced Format sector technology, which makes it compatible with legacy applications and operating environments using aligned writes.

Toshiba intends for the 5 TB MC04ACA series drive to be used in cloud servers and storage systems, like NAS devices (network-attached storage).

It allows for up to 180 TB of DATA to be installed on a single system, you see, which can scale to much more in a data center with synced server blades.

The MC04ACA series comes in 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB as well, just in case you don't have the cash or need for the behemoth.

All of them use 128 MB of buffer cache memory, have an average latency time of 4.17 ms, reach sustained transfer speeds of up to 170 MB/s, and consume no more than 11.3W of energy (6 W in idle state).

All in all, they should be good for at least 800,000 hours (that's the mean time to failure, MTTF for short) and 24 x 7 operation (enterprise servers and data centers do need to be operational all the time after all).

"Our customers need efficient, high-capacity storage for their cloud-based servers and storage platforms," said Don Jeanette, senior director of marketing at Toshiba storage products business unit.

"With capacity points up to 5TB and 7,200 RPM performance, the Toshiba MC Series delivers the capabilities that today's scale-out cloud architecture and use-cases require."

In order to achieve the 5 TB space, Toshiba increased the data density of each platter instead of adding another. Having five disks in a unit full of other moving parts was already more than enough.