Toshiba's New 4TB HDDs Are Ready For Mission Critical Scenarios

Enterprise drives aren't too tough to locate these days, but 4TB ones? Those are a little more special. Toshiba has just expanded its line of business critical HDDs with a new 4TB MG Series offering, along with three other big boys to fill up the roster. Among those four is a new, self-encrypting model. The 3.5-inch 7,200 rpm MG Series includes both SATA models — the MG03ACA400 and the MG03ACA400Y — and SAS models — MG03SCA400 and the MG03SCP400 — and all deliver 4TB of storage, the company’s largest capacity to date.

The company's touting these as ideal for RAID storage and arrays, tiered virtual infrastructures for public and private cloud deployments, archives, and disk-based backup and data protection solutions. They're all engineered to run 24/7 without issue, and they're as reliable as HDDs get. The new 4TB models also deliver an 18 percent increase in sustained transfer rates for both the SATA and SAS interface versions. In addition, the MG Series includes power management features designed to reduce power consumption during off-peak activity periods, helping to reduce operating costs and environmental impact. The optional SATA self-encrypting (SED) models support fast and secure cryptographic- erase using both the latest T13 SANITIZE crypto-scramble protocol and the older T13 ATA Security Erase command protocol. The optional SAS SED models support both the T10 SANITIZE crypto-erase feature and the Trusted Computing Group Enterprise Security Sub-Classification protocols.


Sample shipments of the MG 4TB series models will start in December, with volume shipments scheduled to begin early next year. Pricing isn't being made available, but that's fairly common for enterprise units that are traditionally purchased in bulk.