14 DAY TRIAL // All hard disk drives can go on working for hours upon hours, but after a while errors can crop up and the drive starts to wear down faster. There are, however, some HDDs made specifically for long operation times, like the Toshiba MD04ABA-V Series.
5 TB hasn't been the highest possible HDD capacity for a while now (that honor goes to 6 TB HDD, not counting Seagate's 8 TB monstrosities), but it is still a rare sight on the retail market. Most high-capacity HDDs still stick to 4 TB after all.
Because of the price of 5 TB drives and the low likelihood of them being bought by consumers, their makers have seemingly decided to optimize them for business clients instead.
Case in point, the Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components has released the MD04ABA-V Series HDD.
This is the first low-RPM 5 TB HDD in the 3.5-inch form factor to leave the company's labs. It is made for 24/7 operations, like surveillance networks.
It has rotational vibration sensors (RV), which is good for RAID/multi-HDD based surveillance platforms. And with each HDD supporting up to 32 high-definition cameras, all this makes for very complex, wide-spanning surveillance networks indeed.
The buffer size is of 128 MB and the rotation speed is “low spin” (Toshiba doesn't give a number, oddly enough). The point of the low spin was to reduce energy costs, an increasing worry in a world where fossil fuels are dwindling.
It might have impacted the rate at which video recordings in high definition could be saved, if not for the RAID support. As we all know, when set up in RAID, two or more HDDs appear as a single volume.
Also, in RAID performance rises dramatically (at least in some modes) at the expense of a percentage of the top performance. Basically, what the low spin takes away in performance is offset by multi-device configurations.
Nevertheless, in the end the most important thing here is the 5 TB capacity, which adds a lot of space for recordings when several drives pile up, compared to 4 TB-based installations (which consume just as much power per drive too, if not more in some instances).
Toshiba should be ready to sell the MD04ABA-V Series later this year, but sample shipments are already starting, both in 5 TB and 4 TB versions. The prices, unfortunately, were not disclosed, so we can only speculate. Other 5 TB drives sell for around $425 / €425, so it's a good bet.
