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- Toshiba’s 78 drive JBOD hit 17GB/s throughput and 1.5PB uncooked storage again in 2023
- Experiment confirmed HDDs stay value efficient for scaling capability in knowledge facilities
- With tuning Toshiba believed the setup might attain 20GB/s mixture efficiency
Again in 2023, HDD maker Toshiba determined to point out simply how far mechanical storage might scale when paired with quick connectivity.
Engineers working in its European HDD laboratory took AIC’s J4078-02-04X 4U top-loading JBOD chassis and populated it with 78 MG08 18TB SAS enterprise onerous drives with the purpose being to exhibit how capability and throughput add up when configured in parallel.
Linked to a Supermicro server by way of SAS4 hyperlinks and managed by an Adaptec RAID controller, the array reached 1.5PB of uncooked storage and speeds consistent with PCIe 5.0 benchmarks.
The scaling impact
Sadly, although, it appears the demonstration handed with little consideration exterior specialist circles.
The video, which you’ll be able to watch on the backside of this text, has on the time of writing, racked up a mere 446 views (two of that are me). Legal.
Serve The Dwelling was invited to evaluate the stuffed JBOD in January 2024 and snapped some nice photographs of it, one in all which is on the high of this web page.
The system was designed to point out the scaling impact as extra drives got here on-line.
A single HDD delivered about 300MB/s, however including drives elevated throughput virtually linearly, rising to round 17GB/s when all 78 disks have been in play, sufficient to exceed the boundaries of a 100Gbps community.
With some firmware tuning and {hardware} optimization, the identical chassis might push near 20GB/s, Toshiba claimed on the time.
The demonstration revealed the trade-off between density and efficiency.
Though SSDs dominate the highest-performance tiers of storage at the moment, massive numbers of onerous disks stay cost-effective for bulk capability.
It’s clear from Toshiba’s experiment that when correctly configured, onerous drives can ship spectacular mixture efficiency appropriate for knowledge heart purposes.
In at the moment’s market, programs have already moved previous Toshiba’s 2023 check. Seagate’s Exos E 4U106 now provides as much as 2.5PB of capability in a single chassis and throughput of 36GB/s.
Even so, Toshiba’s spectacular demonstration stays an fascinating reminder that conventional spinning rust can nonetheless play an lively function in enterprise storage structure, not solely as chilly archives however as elements in high-speed, high-capacity arrays.
Toshiba continues to run such experiments, and earlier in 2025 opened a brand new European HDD Innovation Lab at its Düsseldorf website designed to point out how bunching HDDs collectively can ship each capability and efficiency at scale, finally providing a extra reasonably priced different to SSDs.
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