Toshiba Announces 4TB and 5TB Desktop Hard Drives

Energy-efficient Storage for Power-friendly PCs

The Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba, a committed technology leader, announces the MD Series, Toshiba’s first high-capacity desktop hard drives designed for bulk storage system for consumer and commercial desktop computers. With a 3.5-inch factor, the MD series delivers up to 5TB storage with 7,200 rotations per minute (RPM) performance making them more suitable for personal workloads and storage requirements generated by desktop PC.

Multiple Applications Support
The MD series is equipped with a Serial ATA (SATA-2.6/3.0) as a host interface which has 6.0Gbit/s, 3.0Gbit/s and 1.5Gbit/s Transfer speeds. The hard drive technology can almost showcase the storage requirements in every computer:

• Desktop or all-in-one PCs
• Home servers
• PC-based gaming systems
• Desktop RAID
• Direct-attached external storage devices (DAS)
• Network-attached storage devices (NAS)

Advanced Format Technology
Advanced formatting optimizes hard drives to take advantage of the capabilities of newer operating systems. This capability enables hard disk drive manufacturers the ability to design larger capacity hard drives, now and into the future.

Low power consumption and acoustic noise improvements
by using highly integrated LSI components, the MD series can provide very low power consumption with up to 16% idle power savings over the previous model, and this enables the unit to be used in wide range of environmental conditions.  The acoustic noise level is also low with approximately 3.1 Bels at designed to allow manufacturers to leverage the benefits of the latest components and operating systems to deliver high-performance, high-capacity, power-efficient systems.

Multi-segment data buffer
the data buffer is 128 MB. Data is transferred between SATA port and disk media through this data buffer. This feature provides the suitable usage environment for users.

Error Diagnosis and Recovery
the MD series can try to recover from errors in the HDD using its powerful retry processing. If a recoverable data check occurs, error-free data can be transferred to the initiator after being corrected in the data buffer. The initiator software is released from the complicated error recover processing by this error recovery functions of the HDD. The MD series have a diagnostic capability which checks internal controller functions and HDD operations. Also, for early detection of and recovery from the errors on the disk, the MD series has a function for a periodically implementing a full scan of the disk.

With capacity point up to 5TB and 7200 rpm performance, the Toshiba MD series can deliver the capabilities that today’s scale-out business architecture, personal computing and use-cases require.