For the past few years, hard drive manufacturers have run into problems when attempting to increase drive capacities. HDDs aren't growing nearly as quickly as they used to, though much of this decline has been overshadowed by the availability of first SATA-based SSDs, and now, newer solutions using PCIe.
Part of the reason why consumer drives haven't grown more quickly is because technologies like Shingled Magnetic Recording, which allows tracks to overlap each other like shingles, increases storage capacity but decreases performance. At a time when HDDs are already completely outclassed by SSDs, anything that takes performance backwards isn't likely to be a hit with mainstream markets. But Toshiba is leveraging one technology -- helium -- to solve both problems.
As we've previously discussed, filling a drive with helium dramatically lowers the internal pressure inside the drive. It allows manufacturers to pack more drive platters into the same chassis, and it reduced internal heat; lower density means less heat build-up. Helium hard drives haven't exactly become standard on the consumer market, but they've tiptoed their way into certain spaces after first debuting as an exclusively enterprise option. Avoiding SMR also makes the drives easier to manage at either the firmware or the OS level.
Seagate conventional hard drive writing, vs. shingled magnetic recording writing
The flip side is there's only a tiny storage density improvement in play here; Toshiba is using 1.56TB platters, while its competitors are back on ~1.5TB. Shoving more platters into a drive while retaining a 3.5-inch form factor is mechanically impossible after a certain point. And while hydrogen gas is only about half as dense as helium, that's still a much smaller improvement than what helium offered compared with Earth's atmosphere.
The MG07ACA14TE (14TB) and the MG07ACA12TE (12TB) are both 7200 RPM drives with SATA 6G support. The 14TB drive is rated for 260MB/s of sequential read performance, while the 12TB drive is rated for 250MB/s. Toshiba has talked about a 16TB drive, according to Anandtech(Opens in a new window), but that much space would require roughly 1.8TB platters, a significant jump over what the company is using today.
Seagate has pledged to bring the next leap in recording technology, Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to market, alongside helium-filled drives of at least 18TB. Those drives could be on the market as soon as 2018. Western Digital is backing a technology known as MAMR (Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), in which microwave fields emitted by a spin-torque oscillator allows drives to use weaker magnetic fields when writing data. This is supposed to boost densities up to 4.5Tbits/inch2 over time, which would theoretically enable 40TB hard drives, eventually. MAMR may be ready by 2019, though all timelines should be taken provisionally; some of these technologies have been in the works for a decade or more.
