Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation (Toshiba) announces the Mx11 family of helium-sealed high-capacity HDDs. The Mx11 family includes the MG11 Series, which provides capacities of up to 24 TB using conventional magnetic recording (CMR), and the MA11 Series which offers up to 28 TB capacities with shingled magnetic recording (SMR).

The new Mx11 family is designed to deliver new levels of density and power efficiency to customers tasked with controlling (or managing) operational costs while meeting the relentless demands of data growth. Built on a common architecture, both products feature a 10-disk, helium-sealed, standard 3.5-inch 7,200rpm design that leverages Toshiba's innovative flux control microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) technology. Engineered for higher performance and 24/7 reliability, the Mx11 family is designed with a 1GiB buffer, a workload rating of 550 TB per year, an MTTF/MTBF of 2.5 million hours, and an AFR of 0.35%.

Toshiba today introduced the updated N300 series 3.5-inch internal SATA hard drives targeting NAS applications. These drives come with new product branding the company introduced with its recent S300 series HDDs for surveillance/NVR applications. The drives come in capacities of 2 TB, 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, 10 TB, 12 TB, 14 TB, 16 TB, 18 TB, 20 TB, and 22 TB, with the higher capacity models—12 TB and above—being helium-filled, to reduce power/noise characteristics. All models in the series come with CMR (conventional magnetic recording), which ensures predictable write and rewrite performance. The drives come with 7,200 RPM spindle-speed, and depending on the capacity variant, between 64 MB to 512 MB of write cache. The drives come with SATA 6 Gbps host interface, and offer sequential transfer speeds of up to 281 MB/s reads, with up to 268 MB/s writes, with an MTBF rated between 1-1.2 million hours.

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation (Toshiba) has announced next-generation S300 Pro Surveillance Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) targeting the latest requirements in the surveillance storage market. With capacities up to 10 TB and double the buffer size of their predecessors, the upgraded HDDs with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology enable surveillance system integrators, system installation providers, and end users to record, store and analyze their video streams from up to 64 high-definition (HD) cameras.

The highly scalable, 3.5-inch S300 Pro series, with capacity options of 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB and 10 TB, now supports up to 24 bays, and delivers reliable operation even in the most demanding environments, making the HDDs an excellent fit for large-scale video recording systems. Compared to the previous generation, they provide a higher maximum sustained transfer speed of 268MiB/s and double the cache buffer size to 512MiB. They also reduce power consumption, delivering improved total cost of ownership (TCO).

Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (Toshiba) announces the release of its MG10-D Series, a family of air-filled conventional magnetic recording (CMR) HDDs supporting SAS and SATA interfaces and capacities of up to 10 TB. Crafted with precision engineering and over 50 years of Toshiba experience, the MG10-D Series delivers improved performance and power efficiency over prior generations. With sanitize instant erase (SIE) and self-encrypting drive (SED) options, valuable data is safeguarded by a storage solution known for its robust performance and unwavering dependability.

Built for the increasing application demands of enterprise server and storage solutions, the MG10-D Series delivers a new level of performance. For example, compared with the previous model, the new 10 TB MG10ADA10TE provides an approximately 13% better maximum sustained transfer speed of 268MiB/s and doubles the cache buffer size to 512MiB. It also reduces power consumption in active idle mode by approximately 21%, to 5.74 W. Architected to deliver improved total cost of ownership (TCO), the new MG10-D Series fits seamlessly into a wide variety of business-critical applications, such as email, data analytics, data retention, and surveillance.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation ("Toshiba") today held a ceremony to mark the completion of a new 300-millimeter wafer fabrication facility for power semiconductors and an office building at Kaga Toshiba Electronics Corporation in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, one of Toshiba's key group companies. The completion of construction is a major milestone for Phase 1 of Toshiba's multi-year investment program. Toshiba will now proceed with equipment installation, toward starting mass production in the second half of fiscal year 2024. Once Phase 1 reaches full-scale operation, Toshiba's production capacity for power semiconductors, mainly MOSFETs and IGBTs, will be 2.5 times that of fiscal 2021, when the investment plan was made. Decisions on the construction and start of operation of Phase 2 will reflect market trends.

The new manufacturing building follows and will make a major contribution to Toshiba's Business Continuity Plan (BCP): it has a seismic isolation structure that absorbs earthquake shock and redundant power sources. Energy from renewable source and solar panels on the roof of the building (onsite PPA model) will allow the facility to meet 100% of its power requirement with renewable energy.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation (Toshiba) has successfully achieved storage capacities of over 30 TB with two next-generation large capacity recording technologies for hard disk drives (HDDs): Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR). The demonstration drives represent a major milestone in the advance toward commercial products based on each of these emerging recording formats.

HAMR, one of the two technologies that are driving forward next-generation high-capacity data recording, boosts magnetic recording capabilities by locally heating the disk with near-field light. Toshiba achieved 32 TB on 10 disks and adoption of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. Toshiba plans to start shipping test sample HDDs with HAMR technology in 2025.

According to Kyodo News, Japanese chip manufacturer Kioxia and its U.S. counterpart Western Digital are reportedly on the verge of finalizing a merger agreement, aiming to create the world's largest producer of memory chips. The merger plan involves establishing a holding company to consolidate their operations for producing NAND flash memory chips, with the announcement reportedly coming this month. The merged entity is expected to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the United States. As the global semiconductor market contends with competitive pressures and fluctuating demand, the merger is seen as a strategic move to enhance the combined market position of both companies.

Western Digital shareholders are anticipated to hold a majority stake in the new entity, with Kioxia's shareholders, including Toshiba Corporation, owning the remaining stake. The move is poised to give the newly formed company a combined market share of 35.4 percent in NAND memory chips as of March, surpassing South Korea's Samsung, the current leader, with 34.3 percent. However, the merger's ultimate approval hinges on regulators' decisions, including those in China, as semiconductors have become increasingly integral to global economic security. Major Japanese banks, including MUFG Bank and the state-backed Development Bank of Japan, are contemplating loans of up to approximately 1.9 trillion yen (about $12.7 billion) to facilitate the merger.

Insiders claim that a potential merger between Western Digital and Kioxia is closer to happening—following longer than anticipated negotiation between involved parties, including Bain Capital and Toshiba. Technicalities have prolonged proceedings—an August 2023 sign off date was expected—but Kioxia Holdings' lenders seem motivated to get everything over the finish line. According to a Bloomberg report, at least three Japanese banks are ready to submit a commitment letter (next month) for the refinancing of ¥2 trillion ($14 billion) in loans—anonymous sources suggest that Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group are involved. These organizations hope to fund the merger with Western Digital's flash memory business.

Representatives for Western Digital, Kioxia, Bain Capital and (so far named) Japanese banks have declined to provide statements in response to the Bloomberg report. Allegedly, part of the loan will be used to pay special dividends to Kioxia's shareholders. A Reuters summary of said conditions reads: "Under the terms of the deal being negotiated, Western Digital will hold about 50.5% of the combined company with the remaining 49.5% held by Kioxia...Of the 2 trillion yen loan, 400 billion yen will likely be funded through loan commitments and the Development Bank of Japan will provide a loan of 300 billion yen. The rest will likely be equally split between the three megabanks." Bloomberg's insiders believe that Western Digital's hard drive business is not being offered up.

Dynabook Americas, Inc., formerly Toshiba PC Company, has announced that it has refreshed its ultralight Portégé X40L-K and performance-rich 14-inch Tecra A40-K and 15-inch Tecra A50-K laptops to include the new hybrid-architecture 13th Gen Intel Core P-Series 28 W processors. All three laptops also include Windows 11 Pro standard for an enhanced productivity and intuitive computing experience.

"Next generation computing solutions capable of exceeding the demands of modern businesses and individuals is vital to Dynabook's success," said James Robbins, general manager, Dynabook Americas, Inc. "The addition of the 13th Gen Intel Core processors with our own mobile innovations allows Dynabook to deliver uncompromising, premium mobile computing solutions that seamlessly integrate into any business or learning environment. The immense power these three new laptops deliver demonstrates Dynabook's unrelenting commitment to producing the market's best professional-grade computing solutions."

The homebrew and modification community has delved deeper into the recent bout of bricked Nintendo Wii U consoles, unlucky owners are seeing their systems throwing up error codes that indicate an internal memory failure. As covered on TPU almost two weeks ago, it was speculated that leaving a Wii U in a long-term state of unuse was a root cause of the problem. It is now theorized that a simple choice of memory chip is the real issue behind the corruptions, and not a case of leaving your unplugged Wii U stashed in a box somewhere.

An online database has been established on hackmd.io, and a member is collecting hard data from Wii U owners across various online communities and sources. Early indications show that consoles fitted with a Hynix eMMC are leading the pack in terms of number of system failures, Samsung-equipped models are placed in a distant second place, and the Toshiba variant is reported as having zero problems.

Toshiba may have spun off its flash memory business into Kioxia, but the company still makes mechanical hard-drives and derivative products such as portable HDDs. At the 2023 International CES, the company showed off its Canvio Gaming line of portable HDDs. These USB 3.1 portable hard drives come in capacities of up to 4 TB, and support both Xbox and PlayStation consoles, where they can be used to store entire libraries of games that can be made ready to play faster than fetching the game from the Internet.

The Canvio Advance series targets professionals on the move providing storage of up to 4 TB, with auto-backup both to itself and the cloud (though your PC), and data-encryption. The Canvio Ready and Canvio Flex target consumer use-cases. The latter in particular has a broad device compatibility spanning PCs, Macs, tablets, and handhelds, with USB-C and type-A interfaces. Lastly there's the N300 line of enterprise hard drives targeting NAS applications, which come in capacities of up to 18 TB, with up to 7,200 RPM spindle speed, and CMR recording (no SMR). These drives are designed for 24x7 operation, come with up to 1.2 million hours MTTF at 300 TB/year workload, and are backed by 5-year warranties.

Researchers at Toshiba Corporation have achieved a breakthrough in quantum computer architecture: the basic design for a double-transmon coupler that will improve the speed and accuracy of quantum computation in tunable couplers. The coupler is a key device in determining the performance of superconducting quantum computers.

Tunable couplers in a superconducting quantum computer link two qubits and perform quantum computations by turning on and off the coupling between them. Current technology can turn off the coupling of transmon qubits with close frequencies, but this is prone to crosstalk errors that occur on one of the qubits when the other qubit is irradiated with electromagnetic waves for control. In addition, current technology cannot completely turn off coupling for qubits with significantly different frequencies, resulting in errors due to residual coupling.

With only three major players left in the hard disk drive market-Seagate, Toshiba and WDC-the shipment of hard drives ought to be fairly stable, but demand is down across all manufacturers by anything from close to 30 percent to around 40 percent in the case of Toshiba. According to data from Trendfocus that was posted by Storage Newsletter, demand is down across all market segments or at best case flat compared to last year. Nearline enterprise drives remained flat at around 19 million units compared to last year, but performance enterprise storage is down to around 2.5 million units for the last quarter.

On the desktop and consumer electronics side of things, things are even more dire, with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive shipments dropping by 30 and 40 percent respectively. Around 13 million 3.5-inch hard drives and 11 million 2.5-inch drives were still shipped in Q2, but with lower demand for computers and more and more computers moving to SSDs, hard drives have been relegated to backup duties when it comes to most consumer purchases. Seagate was the company least affected by the drop in demand, but is still seeing close to a 30 percent drop in demand, with WDC second at over 30 percent and Toshiba, as mentioned, by maybe as much as 40 percent, which doesn't bode well for the company, as it's the smallest manufacturer of hard drives.

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation announces the DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD, designed for desktop, PC computing, gaming and storage applications where performance and reliability are critical. The new DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD delivers higher performance than Toshiba's predecessor and leverages Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Technology. The DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD has a SATA 6 Gbit/s interface and a 2 TB capacity.

The DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD has a 19% increase in data transfer speed compared to Toshiba's current "DT02 series," achieving a maximum of 210 MiB/s, equipped with a 256 MB buffer, making it suitable for desktop, PC computing, gaming and storage applications. The DT02 7200 RPM 2 TB HDD is available from this month.

Kioxia Holdings Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, announced today that it completed the acquisition of Chubu Toshiba Engineering Corporation. The company entered into a share purchase agreement with Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation) on February 24, 2022, in connection with the acquisition to further strengthen Kioxia Group's technology development capabilities.

This acquisition brings in-house a highly experienced engineering team while also enabling cost efficiencies, which together will improve the enterprise value of the company. The acquisition will enhance Kioxia's technology development capabilities, as well as deliver synergies across the design, operation and production of its manufacturing plants.

China is reacting to new outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus with partial lockdowns. This could further delay the availability of laptops with 12th Gen Intel Core processors and NVIDIA's Ti graphics cards, which debuted at the beginning of the year. The first factories have already been closed in Suzhou in the east of the country. Supply chain and logistics bottlenecks, a shortage of certain chip types and price increases are already on the horizon.

Toshiba Electronic Components Taiwan Corporation announced HDD shipment unit and Exabyte grew 4% and 61%, respectively in 2021. The company shipped 54.68 million units equaling 187.24 Exabytes for the year. Nearline, Mission Critical, Desktop/CE segments posted higher unit and Exabyte results for the year with Nearline HDDs leading all applications with units surging 73% and Exabytes skyrocketing 114%. Toshiba set a new shipment record for Nearline HDDs in 4CQ21, as units grew to 2.90 million units totaling 33.93 Exabytes for the quarter and was up over 94% from a year ago. Toshiba led the industry in Y-Y growth in eight categories for the year, and holds a unique position as an HDD company posting unit growth in 2021.

"Toshiba continues to execute in the Nearline space, and this is reflected in the company's new Nearline unit shipment record in 4CQ21," stated Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "Toshiba's cutting-edge technology such as FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should further their competitiveness in the Nearline HDD market."

Toshiba Corporation held an investor relations event in Tokyo, Japan. During Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation's presentation, Mr. Hiroyuki Sato, President & CEO of TDSC, unveiled a descriptive roadmap of Toshiba's next-generation Nearline HDDs. Data generation continues to grow at a double digit rates every year, and demand from cloud companies to store the burgeoning data is driving the need for higher capacity HDDs. To meet this surging demand, Toshiba plans to leverage its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), and Disk Stacking technology to lift Nearline HDD capacities to 30 TB by FY2023, and greater capacities beyond.

"Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their exact capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers' needs," said Raghu Gururangan, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. Vice President, Engineering & Product Marketing. "Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces TCO (total cost of ownership) of our Nearline HDDs."

Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation ("Toshiba") today announced that it will construct a new 300-milimeter wafer fabrication facility for power semiconductors at its main discrete semiconductor production base, Kaga Toshiba Electronics Corporation, in Ishikawa Prefecture. Construction will take place in two phases, allowing the pace of investment to be optimized against market trends, with the production start of Phase 1 scheduled for within fiscal 2024. When Phase 1 reaches full capacity, Toshiba's power semiconductor production capacity will be 2.5 times that of fiscal 2021.

Power devices are essential components for managing and reducing power consumption in every kind of electronic equipment, and for achieving a carbon neutral society. Current demand is expanding on vehicle electrification and the automation of industrial equipment, with very strong demand for low-voltage MOSFETs (metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors) and IGBTs (insulated-gate bipolar transistors) and other devices. To date, Toshiba has met this demand growth by increasing production capacity on 200-milimeter lines, and expediting the start of production on 300-milimeter production lines from the first half of fiscal 2023 to the second half of fiscal 2022. Decisions on the new fab's overall capacity and equipment investment, the start of production, production capacity and production plan will reflect market trends.

Backblaze, a cloud storage provider has recently released their latest annual report on the performance of their 202,759 hard disks in operation. The company operates drives of various capacities and ages from Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and WDC monitoring each models annualized failure rate (AFR). The latest report shows that the AFR for all drives in operation rose to 1.01% in 2021 up from 0.93% in 2020 but significantly below the 1.83% reported in 2019. The larger capacity newer drives are primarily responsible for this figure with them accounting for 69% of total active drives but only 57% of drive failures.

The most reliable drive operated by Backblaze remains the 6 TB Seagate ST6000DX000 with an AFR of just 0.11% while having an average age of 80.4 months. The least reliable drive is also from Seagate with the 14 TB ST14000NM0138 having an AFR of 4.66% in Q4 2021 down from 6.29% in Q3 2021. While these statistics cannot be used to reliably judge the quality of drives from any particular manufacturer they serve as a good reference for general trends in hard drive reliability.

Toshiba America Electronic Components today announced a new Nearline HDD shipment record of 2.89 million units for the December 2021 quarter. The new Nearline unit record reflected year over year growth of 80% and topped the previous best quarter by 4% set earlier in the year. Nearline Exabytes in the quarter grew sequentially to 33.81 and was up over 94% from a year ago.

"Toshiba continues to execute in the Nearline space, and this is reflected in the company's new Nearline unit shipment record in 4CQ21," stated Ed Burns, Research Director at IDC. "Toshiba's cutting-edge technology such as FC-MAMR (Flux-Controlled - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MAS-MAMR (Microwave Assisted Switching - Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should further their competitiveness in the Nearline HDD market."

Toshiba Group has announced the world's first demonstration of HDD recording performance improvement with Microwave Assisted Switching-Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAS-MAMR), a next-generation magnetic recording technology. The demonstration confirms that the technology delivers substantial storage capacity gains, and Toshiba now aims to realize early commercialization of nearline HDDs with capacities exceeding 30 TB.

Toshiba is placing considerable R&D effort on MAMR, a breakthrough technology that boosts HDD recording density. In 2021, the company started shipment of 18 TB HDDs that apply Flux Control MAMR (FC-MAMR ), which uses spin torque oscillators to assist recording. MAS-MAMR is expected to improve recording density beyond that of FC-MAMR by locally exposing microwave to -recording media. However, this was not shown to be possible in practice until the recent demonstration.

Optical computing has been the research topic of many startups and tech companies like Intel and IBM, searching for the practical approach to bring a new way of computing. However, the most innovative solutions often come out of startups and today is no exception. According to the report from EETimes, optical computing startup Lightelligence has developed a processor that outperforms regular GPUs by 100 times in calculating some of the most challenging mathematical problems. As the report indicates, the Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE) from Lightelligence manages to outperform regular GPUs, like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080, by almost 100 times in the NP-complete class of problems.

More precisely, the PACE accelerator was tackling the Ising model, an example of a thermodynamic system used for understanding phase transitions, and it achieved some impressive results. Compared to the RTX 3080, it reached 100 times greater speed-up. All of that was performed using 12,000 optical devices integrated onto a circuit and running at 1 GHz frequency. Compared to the purpose-built Toshiba's simulated bifurcation machine based on FPGAs, the PACE still outperforms this system designed to tackle the Ising mathematical computation by 25 times. The PACE chip uses standard silicon photonics integration of Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) for computing and MEMS to change the waveguide shape in the MZI.

Toshiba announces the MN09, a massive capacity 18 TB addition to its NAS HDD line-up. High growth in data creation is driving demand for higher storage capacities, and work-from-home customers need fast access to data and the ability to archive and share data in private cloud environments. The 18 TB MN09 delivers greater storage capacity and power efficiency to meet the growing needs of storage customers.

MN09 is a 9-disk helium-sealed conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drive that leverages Toshiba's new innovative Flux Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR ) technology. FC-MAMR advances CMR capacity to 18 TB and delivers increased density per platter over previous designs. The MN09 is the 3rd generation to use Toshiba's pioneering 9-disk helium-sealed mechanical design.

Marvell today announced that it will ship its 5 billionth hard disk drive (HDD) controller next month, marking a significant milestone in the company's 25 years of delivering data storage solutions. This achievement is a testament to the longevity of Marvell's HDD business and underscores the company's ongoing commitment to investing in and developing cutting-edge Bravera HDD products and IP to address the ever-increasing need for greater storage capacity.

The ongoing digital transformation is driving the adoption of cloud services, digital payments, artificial intelligence, and 5G, requiring higher capacity data storage. As a result, cloud data centers are looking for HDD storage to meet the growing zettabyte demand. Marvell's comprehensive suite of Bravera HDD controller and preamplifier solutions leverage the company's IP and process excellence including over 1,500 HDD-related patents and 18 generations of Read Channel IP. With its advanced architecture built on best-in-class areal density, data reliability, and power consumption, Marvell is enabling the growth of mass storage applications from the edge to the cloud.

"Reaching our 5 billionth HDD controller shipment is a huge accomplishment and we'd like to take a moment to thank our longstanding customers and partners for their trust and collaboration over many years. We celebrate this milestone alongside them," said Dan Christman, Executive Vice President, Storage Group at Marvell. "We remain deeply committed to the HDD market and will continue to invest in leading-edge Bravera technologies that advance the next generation of cloud data storage infrastructure."