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Storage & Backup
The best hard drive 2025

Kiwi storage startup uses proprietary 144TB SSD to hit 230PB storage per 42U rack – but it will cost well over $2 million to get such a system

No, that’s not a misprint – Sandisk unveils massive 256TB SSD, but it will power the next generation of AI workloads, so don’t think you’ll ever get one

A workstation PC with 540TB storage is within reach — this tower case can hold up to 15 x 36TB Seagate HDDs

Kioxia demonstrates ultra fast SSD that uses innovative tech to deliver a staggering 64GBps on PCIe Gen6 – and no, it’s not coming to a PC near you anytime soon

Kioxia unveils 246TB SSD behemoth — the LC 9 is the largest SSD ever launched and can store 52,000 DVD movies

Second 246TB SSD confirmed for 2026 as Micron unveils 122TB 6600 ION PCIe Gen 5 SSD in a bid to replace hard disk drives in data centers

Ceramic-based startup wants to put more than 100,000TB in a 42U rack by 2030 — but it will take almost 50 years to fill it up

Want to store 204TB of storage in a device barely bigger than two shoe boxes? Check out the XCY X108, a NAS that can take up to 8 HDDs

You can buy a 30TB hard disk drive, the world’s largest HDD right now, for only $600 — Seagate Exos M breaks cover online, and it is a monster

36TB Seagate Exos SATA hard drive goes on preorder for $800 – world’s largest HDD is already sold as refurbished, but why?

Solidigm confirms 245+ TB SSDs set to launch before end of 2026

The world’s fastest SSD has been announced, but it won’t fit in a PC — Micron 9650 is the first PCIe Gen6 SSD and will reach 28GB/s in sequential read

Plucky rival to Kioxia and Samsung unveils thinnest large capacity SSD ever: Exascend 30.72TB SSD is 7mm thick and has a one DWPD endurance

Seagate’s massive 30TB hard drive has massive price cut at just $18.80 per TB
– Exos M HDD in on sale at Provantage for $564 with a 5-year warranty

Two years ago, Toshiba used 78 hard drives to reach PCIe 5.0 speeds in massive 1.5PB JBOD setup – but barely anyone noticed

Wayne Williams

21 September 2025

The idea aimed to show how hard drives scale in parallel

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(Image credit: Serve The Home)

Toshiba’s 78 drive JBOD hit 17GB/s throughput and 1.5PB raw storage back in 2023
Experiment showed HDDs remain cost effective for scaling capacity in data centers
With tuning Toshiba believed the setup could reach 20GB/s aggregate performance

Back in 2023, HDD maker Toshiba decided to show just how far mechanical storage could scale when paired with fast connectivity.

Engineers working in its European HDD laboratory took AIC’s J4078-02-04X 4U top-loading JBOD chassis and populated it with 78 MG08 18TB SAS enterprise hard drives with the aim being to demonstrate how capacity and throughput add up when configured in parallel.
Connected to a Supermicro server through SAS4 links and controlled by an Adaptec RAID controller, the array reached 1.5PB of raw storage and speeds in line with PCIe 5.0 benchmarks.

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Kiwi storage startup uses proprietary 144TB SSD to hit 230PB storage per 42U rack – but it will cost well over $2 million to get such a system

No, that’s not a misprint – Sandisk unveils massive 256TB SSD, but it will power the next generation of AI workloads, so don’t think you’ll ever get one

A workstation PC with 540TB storage is within reach — this tower case can hold up to 15 x 36TB Seagate HDDs

The scaling effect
Sadly, though, it seems the demonstration passed with little attention outside specialist circles.

The video, which you can watch at the bottom of this article, has at the time of writing, racked up a mere 446 views (two of which are me). Criminal.
Serve The Home was invited to review the filled JBOD in January 2024 and snapped some great photos of it, one of which is at the top of this page.
The system was designed to show the scaling effect as more drives came online.

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A single HDD delivered about 300MB/s, but adding drives increased throughput almost linearly, rising to around 17GB/s when all 78 disks were in play, enough to exceed the limits of a 100Gbps network.
With some firmware tuning and hardware optimization, the same chassis could push close to 20GB/s, Toshiba claimed at the time.
The demonstration revealed the trade-off between density and performance.

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Kiwi storage startup uses proprietary 144TB SSD to hit 230PB storage per 42U rack – but it will cost well over $2 million to get such a system

No, that’s not a misprint – Sandisk unveils massive 256TB SSD, but it will power the next generation of AI workloads, so don’t think you’ll ever get one

A workstation PC with 540TB storage is within reach — this tower case can hold up to 15 x 36TB Seagate HDDs

Although SSDs dominate the highest-performance tiers of storage today, large numbers of hard disks remain cost-effective for bulk capacity.
It’s clear from Toshiba’s experiment that when properly configured, hard drives can deliver impressive aggregate performance suitable for data center applications.
In today’s market, systems have already moved past Toshiba’s 2023 test. Seagate’s Exos E 4U106 now offers up to 2.5PB of capacity in a single chassis and throughput of 36GB/s.
Even so, Toshiba’s impressive demonstration remains an interesting reminder that traditional spinning rust can still play an active role in enterprise storage architecture, not only as cold archives but as components in high-speed, high-capacity arrays.
Toshiba continues to run such experiments, and earlier in 2025 opened a new European HDD Innovation Lab at its Düsseldorf site designed to show how bunching HDDs together can deliver both capacity and performance at scale, ultimately offering a more affordable alternative to SSDs.

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Wayne Williams

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Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.

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Kiwi storage startup uses proprietary 144TB SSD to hit 230PB storage per 42U rack – but it will cost well over $2 million to get such a system

No, that’s not a misprint – Sandisk unveils massive 256TB SSD, but it will power the next generation of AI workloads, so don’t think you’ll ever get one

A workstation PC with 540TB storage is within reach — this tower case can hold up to 15 x 36TB Seagate HDDs

Kioxia demonstrates ultra fast SSD that uses innovative tech to deliver a staggering 64GBps on PCIe Gen6 – and no, it’s not coming to a PC near you anytime soon

Kioxia unveils 246TB SSD behemoth — the LC 9 is the largest SSD ever launched and can store 52,000 DVD movies

Second 246TB SSD confirmed for 2026 as Micron unveils 122TB 6600 ION PCIe Gen 5 SSD in a bid to replace hard disk drives in data centers

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