- JBOD 78 Drive de Toshiba reached a flow of 17 GB / s and a gross storage of 1.5 pb in 2023
- Experience has shown that hard drives remain profitable for scale capacity in data centers
- With the setting, Toshiba thought that the configuration could achieve aggregated performance of 20 GB / s
In 2023, the manufacturer of Toshiba hard drives decided to show how much mechanical storage could evolve when associated with rapid connectivity.
The engineers working in its European hard drive laboratory took the J4078-04X 4U 4u 4u chassis of AIC and filled it with 78 mg08 18 to SAS Enterprise Drives, in order, being to demonstrate how the capacity and the speed are added when configured in parallel.
Connected to a SuperMicro server via SAS4 links and controlled by a RAID ADAPTEC controller, the table has reached 1.5% gross storage and online speeds with PCIE 5.0 marks.
The scaling effect
Unfortunately, however, it seems that the demonstration has passed with little attention outside the specialized circles.
The video, which you can watch at the bottom of this article, has at the time of writing, accumulated only 446 views (two of which are me). Criminal.
Serve the house Was invited to review the JBOD filled in January 2024 and took superb photos, one of which is at the top of this page.
The system was designed to show the scaling effect as more and more discs have been online.
A single hard drive delivered about 300 MB / s, but the addition of discs increased the flow almost linearly, reaching about 17 GB / s when the 78 discs were at stake, enough to exceed the limits of a 100 GBPS network.
With a firmware adjustment and hardware optimization, the same chassis could push almost 20 GB / s, said Toshiba at the time.
The demonstration revealed the compromise between density and performance.
Although the SSDs today dominate the most efficient storage levels, a large number of hard drives remain profitable for loose capacity.
It clearly emerges from Toshiba’s experience only when correctly configured, hard drives can provide impressive aggregate performance adapted to the applications of the data center.
On the current market, the systems have already exceeded the Toshiba test in 2023. Seagate exos 4U106 now offers up to 2.5% capacity in a single chassis and a speed of 36 GB / s.
Despite this, the impressive demonstration of Toshiba remains an interesting reminder that the traditional rust of rotation can always play an active role in the company storage architecture, not only in the form of cold archives but as components in high -speed and high capacity networks.
Toshiba continues to carry out such experiences, and earlier in 2025, opened a new European engineering laboratory on its Düsseldorf site designed to show how hard drives together can offer both capacity and performance, ultimately offering a more affordable alternative to SSDs.
