Toshiba Announces First FC-MAMR Disks with Capacities Up to 34 TB
Toshiba Announces First FC-MAMR Disks with Capacities Up to 34 TB
Toshiba has announced the launch of new hard disks in the M12 series with capacities up to 34 TB that use SMR technology, aimed at cloud service providers and other companies managing large data centers. Toshiba also announced the arrival in the third quarter of 2026 of 28 TB hard disks using CMR technology.
Toshiba Surpasses 30 TB with Its First MAMR Hard Disks
Toshiba has introduced its first hard disks that leverage a new recording technology, as well as a new technology for creating the platters. The new M12 units indeed use glass platters instead of aluminum, which contributes to making them thinner, and employ FC-MAMR (Flux Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology that utilizes microwaves to heat the platter in a very localized manner to reduce the magnetic coercivity of the medium, allowing for the use of smaller tracks.
The new hard disks offer capacities of 30 and 34 TB thanks to the use of SMR technology, which partially overlaps tracks. Unlike traditional units, therefore, rewriting a sector requires the rewriting of adjacent ones as well. Given their deployment in data center environments, Toshiba has opted to use the so-called "managed SMR" technology, where these rewrites are managed directly by the operating system, providing greater control over the disks and improved performance.
According to Toshiba, the new generation enables an 8% increase in data transfer performance (reaching up to 282 MB/s) and an 18% reduction in consumption per terabyte compared to the previous generation. The MTBF is 2.5 million hours.
It is interesting to note that Toshiba's FC-MAMR technology appears, at this stage, to be less effective than Seagate's HAMR technology. Two aspects need to be considered: Toshiba uses 11 platters instead of the standard 10, and reaches 30 TB only by using SMR technology which partially overlaps tracks. If we assume that the CMR variants are identical to the SMR ones, except for the track layout, we find that the technology can provide 2.5 TB per platter, a figure well below that obtained by Seagate, which already offers over 3 TB per platter.
Toshiba states that, in the future, it aims to employ a variant of HAMR technology and to reach as many as 12 platters within a single hard disk, but has not announced when we will see the arrival of the first devices based on HAMR technology and with a more competitive density.