Toshiba unveils roadmap showing 30TB HDDs in 2023

With an ever-growing need for storage, from UHD movies to games like ARK: Survival Evolved and its near-300GB size when all DLCs are installed, no one seems to have enough space in their computers anymore. That’s great news for storage device manufacturers, who are in a constant fight to make ever-larger drives.

President Hiroyuki Sato of TDSC (Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation) unveiled in an investor relations event held in Tokyo a new roadmap featuring a 30TB HDD coming sometime in 2023.

According to the roadmap, these drives will use MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching – Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) and 11 disk platters. That means a density of 2.72TB per platter, which ought to push Toshiba ahead of its competition.

Moreover, the chart shows a 26TB drives coming this year (probably helium-filled) using 10 platters, also combined with MAS-MAMR. 35TB drives, meanwhile, are scheduled for 2025 and 40TB-plus drives for 2026, but this time using HARM (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording). Such far-out predictions are always subject to revision, of course.

As expected, these drives are coming first to enterprise and datacenters, but later down the line they will end up in consumer PCs.

“Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers’ needs.” said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President.

Like any new technology, MAS-MAMR will be expensive at the beginning, though the trickle-down effect ought to make it cheaper over time. For the time being, however, we have to make do with our ‘peasant’ 18TB HDDs.