Toshiba confirmed its 30TB hard drive plan, which will utilize MAS-MAMR technology

Showa Electric (SDK), one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives, has confirmed the development of media using Microwave Assisted Switching-Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording Technology (MAS-MAMR). The technology will be adopted by Toshiba, one of Showa Denko's major customers, laying the foundation for building a high-capacity mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) of more than 30TB.

According to TomsHardware, MAS-MAMR technology uses microwaves to change the magnetic coercive force of the hard disk media even more, making the track narrower, thereby increasing the area density, which is part of MAMR technology. This was developed by Showa Denkino (Dielectric), TDK (a read-write head equipped with a dual spin jet layer), and Toshiba (a drive), although the exact area density has not yet been revealed, but it is enough for Toshiba to manufacture hard drives with a capacity of more than 30TB.

Replacing discs and read-write heads is a big deal for hard drive manufacturers, who are often more willing to change a critical part. Seagate had to change the architecture of the hard drive due to its use of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. Toshiba is currently facing the same problem, but the MAS-MAMR technology does not seem to need to be drastically modified, which also allows the technology to be used in the next few years.

A few months ago, Toshiba released the industry's first 18TB hard drive with microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology, the X300 series for desktops and the N300 series for NAS, both of which are consumer-grade products. These are Toshiba's third-generation 7200 RPM-class helium-charged technology hard drives, equipped with 512MB of cache, packed on 9 discs. The discs used are also manufactured by Showa Electric, with a single disc capacity of 2TB and a density of about 1.5 Tb/inch2 through FC-MAMR technology. Earlier, Toshiba also released the enterprise-grade MG09 series, which applied FC-MAMR technology for the first time and achieved a 12.5% increase in storage density.