- Toshiba’s 78 drive JBOD hit 17GB/s throughput and 1.5PB uncooked storage again in 2023
- Experiment confirmed HDDs stay price efficient for scaling capability in information facilities
- With tuning Toshiba believed the setup may attain 20GB/s combination efficiency
Again in 2023, HDD maker Toshiba determined to indicate simply how far mechanical storage may 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 arduous drives with the purpose being to show how capability and throughput add up when configured in parallel.
Related to a Supermicro server via 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 watch on the backside of this text, has on the time of writing, racked up a mere 446 views (two of that are me). Felony.
Serve The Residence was invited to evaluation the crammed JBOD in January 2024 and snapped some nice pictures of it, certainly one of which is on the high of this web page.
The system was designed to indicate 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 may 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 arduous disks stay cost-effective for bulk capability.
It’s clear from Toshiba’s experiment that when correctly configured, arduous drives can ship spectacular combination efficiency appropriate for information middle functions.
In at the moment’s market, techniques have already moved previous Toshiba’s 2023 take a look at. Seagate’s Exos E 4U106 now presents 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 web site designed to indicate how bunching HDDs collectively can ship each capability and efficiency at scale, in the end providing a extra reasonably priced different to SSDs.
