14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate may have successfully designed and released an 8 TB HDD, but models with 6 TB will continue to be the real “top-end” in this sector until Western Digital and Toshiba match that offer.
Not hard to do given how tricky it is to cram so much data on magnetic platters, not to mention that the $260 / €210 price is the same as on a 6 TB drive which makes things even harder.
Speaking of Toshiba, the company has just released a new 6 TB drive, one whose price has not been revealed, unfortunately.
On the other hand, the newcomer is said to have a much higher performance than all other HDDs in the same type. The type being enterprise hard disk drives.
The MG04 series has been expanded
Previously, the top capacity for this range of 3.5-inch magnetic platter storage devices was of 4 TB. A more than decent capacity.
Especially when you take into account the fact that most NAS devices and regular server systems aren't designed for drives of bigger capacity than that.
However, models with 5 TB and 6 TB support have been rising in number, both causing and benefiting from the release of higher-capacity HDDs.
Toshiba's new MG04 6 TB HDD offers more than just some extra space though. The 50% increase in max capacity is impressive, true, but it's supplemented by a 30% rise in sustained data transfers.
Which is to say, while the 5 TB drives were limited to 165 MB/s (MG03xxx400x), the 6 TB one can achieve 205 MB/s (MG04xxx60Ex).
The SATA models probably won't work so well, but the new storage units are available with professional SAS technology as well, which has 12 Gbps top transfer rate instead of 6 Gbps.
Finally, both industry-standard 4K native and 512e Advanced Format sector technologies are supported. System admins and server builders will know best which to use.
Availability and pricing
There are two MG04 6 TB HDDs with 12 Gbps SAS, called MG04ACA and MG04SCA. Both have persistent write cache technology (PWC), which retains the buffer data in case of power failure, avoiding corruption and loss. Cryptographic erase and instant sanitization is available on both.
Sadly, the price is unknown, as we said, and will probably stay that way for a good, long while. Sample shipments will start in the first quarter of 2015, which means that retail availability will ramp up only months afterwards.
