Toshiba announced the M12 Series of 3.5-inch nearline hard disk drives targeting hyperscale and cloud service providers in large-scale data centers. The M12 Series employs Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology to achieve storage capacities ranging from 30 to 34 TB. Sample shipments of the SMR models have started. Toshiba also plans to begin sample shipments of M12 drives using Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) with capacities up to 28 TB in the third quarter of 2026.
The announcement coincides with World Backup Day, which highlights the growing need for data backup and protection amid expanding digital services, video content distribution, cloud adoption, and rising demand from AI and data science applications.
Data centers require higher-capacity and better-performing HDDs to enable more efficient system configurations. The M12 Series addresses this by increasing storage capacity within the standard 3.5-inch nearline HDD form factor.
The drives incorporate an additional magnetic disk compared to previous generations (CMR MG11 and SMR MA11 Series), resulting in a total of 11 disks. They use glass substrates for the recording media instead of aluminum, providing higher durability and allowing a thinner design. The enclosures are helium-filled, and the drives combine Toshiba’s Flux Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR™) technology with SMR.
SMR technology overlaps data tracks to boost recording density, similar to roof shingles. To manage the associated performance impact on random writes, the M12 Series uses a host-managed SMR architecture, where the host system handles data placement and rewriting.
The new SMR HDDs deliver a maximum data transfer rate of 282 MiB/s, an 8% improvement over the prior generation. Power consumption per terabyte (W/TB) is approximately 18% lower. The drives are rated for continuous 24/7 operation, with an annual workload rating of 550 TB, a mean time to failure/mean time between failures (MTTF/MTBF) of 2.5 million hours, and an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.35%.
Toshiba stated that it plans to further raise HDD capacities in the future by adopting next-generation technologies such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and implementing 12-disk configurations.
