- Toshiba’s 78 Drive JBOD hit 17GB/s throopoot and 1.5PB raw storage in 2023
- The experiment has shown that HDD is cost effective for scaling capacity in data centers
- Tuning with Tuning Toshiba is believed to have reached 20GB/s total performance
Back in 2023, HDD manufacturer Toshiba decided to show how far the mechanical storage could be when added with rapid connectivity.
Engineers working in their European HDD laboratory took AIC’s J4078-02-04x 4U top-loading Jbod Chassis and populated it with 78 Mg08 18 18 18 18 18TB SAS Enterprise Hard Drive, aimed at displaying capacity and throwput when configured in parallel.
The SAS4 connected to a supermichro server through the link and controlled by an adaptec raid controller, the array 1.5PB raw storage and PCIE 5.0 reached 1.5PB of speed to suit the 5.0 benchmark.
Scaling effect
Sadly, however, it seems that the performance was passed with little attention outside the expert circles.
The video, which you can see at the bottom of this article, at the time of writing, racks only 446 scenes (two of which I am). Criminal.
Home In January 2024, it was invited to review the filled JBod and some of it was taken on the top of this page.
The system was designed to show the scaling effect as more drives came online.
A single HDD gave around 300MB/s, but the throopoot increased by connecting the drive almost linearly, increased to about 17GB/s when all 78 discs were in playing, which was sufficient to exceed the boundaries of the 100GBPS network.
With some firmware tuning and hardware adaptation, the same chassis could push close to 20GB/s, Toshiba claimed at that time.
The performance revealed the trade-band between density and performance.
Although SSDs dominate the highest performance levels of storage today, a large number of hard disks are cost effective for bulk capacity.
It is clear from the use of Toshiba that when properly configured, hard drive data centers can give effective total performance suitable for applications.
In today’s market, the system has already pushed forward the 2023 Tests of Toshiba. SeagateThe EXOS E 4U106 of now offers 2.5PB capacity and 36GB/s throopoot in the same chassis.
Nevertheless, Toshiba’s impressive performance remains an interesting reminder that the traditional spinning rust can still play an active role in the enterprise storage architecture, not only as cold archives but also as components in high speed, high speed, high-capacitors.
Toshiba continues to run such experiments, and before that a new new in 2025 European HDD Innovation Laboratory It is designed to show on its Dasseldorf site how HDDs can distribute both the ability and performance together on a scale, eventually providing more affordable options for SSDs.
