Toshiba foresees HDDs with 10 platters, 20+TB capacity

At its investors day in November, Toshiba talked about the future of its hard disk drive unit. AnandTech analyzed the presentation and reports that the Japanese firm is planning to conquer more of the nearline market. While Toshiba has 36 percent of the global HDD market, the company has a marketshare of just 17 percent of the more lucrative enterprise/nearline market.

Toshiba wants to move its focus away from client drives and said that going forward, all of its leading-edge HDDs will be helium-filled. This will require an increase in production capacity as the firm's helium HDD production line in its Carmelray Industrial Park plant is somewhat limited.

The company says it will adopt disks with 10 platter designs and has plans for a 20TB HDD as soon as fiscal 2021.

On the product side of things, Toshiba has a rather solid roadmap. Earlier this year the company confirmed that it would use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and energy assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies (e.g., MAMR, HAMR) to boost areal density. In addition to that, the company’s roadmap now officially includes drives with 10 platters (up from nine today). Which to offer some context, a 10-platter design using the highest-capacity platters available today would enable a 22 TB HDD. Though it bears mentioning that adding a 10th platter to existing drives is not a trivial task (i.e. how do you fit it in?), so Toshiba isn't disclosing when they expect to have their 10-platter design ready.