- Toshibas 78 Drive JBod hit 17 GB/s flow and 1.5 pb raw storage back in 2023
- The experiment showed that HDDs remain cost effective for scaling capacity in data centers
- With tuning, Toshiba thought the setup could reach 20 GB/s total benefit
Back in 2023, HDD manufacturer Toshiba decided to show how far mechanical storage could be scaling when paired with quick connection.
Engineers who worked in its European HDD Laboratory, took Aics J4078-02-04x 4U top-loading JBOD chassis and populated it with 78 MG08 18TB SAS Enterprise hard drives to demonstrate how capacity and flow added when configured in parallel.
Connected to a super micro -server through SAS4 links and controlled by an Adactec Raid -Controller, the array reached 1.5 PB with raw storage and speeds in accordance with PCIE 5.0 Benchmarks.
The scaling effect
Unfortunately, it seems that the demonstration was sent with some attention outside of special circles.
The video, which you can see at the bottom of this article, has at the time of writing hit only 446 views (two of which are me). Criminal.
Serve the home was invited to review the filled JBod in January 2024 and broke some amazing photos of it, one of which is at the top of this page.
The system was designed to show the scaling effect as several drives came online.
A single HDD delivered approx. 300 MB/s, but added drive increased the flow almost linearly, increased to approx. 17 GB/s, when all 78 disks were in play, enough to exceed the limits of a 100 Gbps network.
With some firmware tuning and hardware optimization, the same chassis could push close to 20 GB/s, Toshiba claimed at the time.
The demonstration revealed the exchange between density and performance.
Although SSDs dominate the highest performance storage levels today, a large number of hard drives remain cost effective for bulk capacity.
It appears from Toshiba’s experiment that hard drives, when properly configured, can provide impressive total performance suitable for data center applications.
In today’s market, systems have already moved past Toshibas 2023 tests. Seagates Exos E 4U106 now offers up to 2.5 PB capacity in a single chassis and flow of 36 GB/s.
Still, Toshiba’s impressive demonstration is still an interesting reminder that traditional spinning rust can still play an active role in business storage architecture, not only as cold archives, but as high -speed components with high capacity.
Toshiba continues to run such experiments, and earlier in 2025 a new European HDD -Innovation Laboratory at its Düsseldorf site opened to show how bunching HDDs together can deliver both capacity and scale performance, which ultimately offers a more affordable alternative to SSDs.
