- Unit 78 of Toshiba JBOD reached the yield of 17 GB/s and the raw storage of 1.5pb in 2023
- The experiment showed that HDDs remain profitable for scale capacity in data centers
- With Toshiba tuning, I believed that the configuration could reach the aggregate of 20 GB/s
In 2023, the HDD manufacturer Toshiba decided to show to what extent mechanical storage could climb when combined with rapid connectivity.
The engineers who work in their European HDD laboratory took the JBOD chassis of higher load J4078-04x of AIC AIC and populated it with 78 mg08 18TB SAS Enterprise Drives Hard Drives with the aim of demonstrating how the capacity and performance are added when configured in parallel.
Connected to a supermicro server through SAS4 bonds and controlled by a RAID adaptec controller, the matrix reached 1.5pb of raw storage and accelerated in line with the PCIE 5.0 reference points.
The scale effect
Unfortunately, however, it seems that the demonstration passed with little attention outside the specialized circles.
The video, which can be seen at the bottom of this article, at the time of writing, accumulated only 446 views (two of which are me). Criminal.
House He was invited to check the JBOD full in January 2024 and took some excellent photos, one of which is at the top of this page.
The system was designed to show the scale effect as more units began.
A single HDD delivered approximately 300 MB/s, but added units of greater performance almost linearly, increasing around 17 GB/s when the 78 albums were at stake, enough to exceed the limits of a 100 Gbps network.
With a little firmware adjustment and hardware optimization, the same chassis could push about 20 GB/s, Toshiba claimed at that time.
The demonstration revealed the compensation between density and performance.
Although the SSD dominate higher performance storage levels today, a large number of hard drives remain profitable for bulk capacity.
From the Toshiba experiment it is clear that, when they are configured correctly, hard drives can offer an impressive added performance suitable for data centers applications.
In the current market, the systems have already passed Toshiba’s 2023 test. Exos E 4U106 of Seagate Now offers up to 2.5pb capacity in a single chassis and yield of 36 GB/s.
Even so, the impressive demonstration of Toshiba remains an interesting reminder that traditional spinning oxide can still play an active role in business storage architecture, not only as cold files but as components in high speed and high capacity matrices.
Toshiba continues to carry out such experiments, already beginning of 2025 opened a new European HDD innovation laboratory in its Düsseldorf site designed to show how the HDDs that group together can offer capacity and performance on scale, offering a more affordable alternative to the SSDs.
