Toshiba unveils world's first 14 TB hard drive to use conventional magnetic recording

Back in October, Western Digital announced it had beaten rival Seagate by releasing the world’s first 14TB hard drive, but Toshiba has now gone one better with the MG07ACA; while it also has 14 TB of storage, the drive is the first of its size to use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) rather than the slower shingled magnetic recording (SMR).

Unlike SMR drives, the MG07ACA doesn’t need to rewrite adjacent tracks when the contents of an existing track are updated, which slows down the process. Toshiba’s helium-sealed design, which reduces aerodynamic drag on the platters, uses a 9-disk array—another world first, according to the company. That works out at a 1.555TB/platter areal density.

"We have raised the bar with the new MG07ACA Series 9-disk helium-sealed design," said Akitoshi Iwata, Vice President of Storage Products Division, Toshiba Electronic Devices and Storage Corporation. "By utilizing an innovative design, we continue to improve the benefits that high-capacity disk storage can deliver to our broad global customer base."
The drive spins at 7,200rpm and features a 6Gb/s SATA interface. Not only does it have 40 percent more capacity that its predecessor—the MG06ACA drive—but it also improves the W/GB efficiency rating by 50 percent compared to the previous generation.

Toshiba hasn’t released many other specifications, such as price and throughput, but it did reveal that the drive has a 2.5 million-hour (285 years) MTBF (mean time between failures). There’s also an eight-platter model available with a 12 TB capacity.

While they would certainly be helpful for storing your Steam catalog, the MG07ACA drives are aimed at enterprise users in businesses such as cloud and hyper-scale data centers, rather than regular consumers.