Toshiba MG09ACA18TE 18TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5in MG09 Series Hard Drive

The Toshiba MG09ACA18TE is the 18TB, 512e SATA model in Toshiba's MG09 Series of data center hard drives. It is a 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM drive built on a nine-disk, helium-sealed mechanism, with a 512MiB buffer. Toshiba reaches 18TB with flux-control microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) while keeping conventional magnetic recording (CMR), so the drive behaves like any other CMR disk in RAID sets, NAS pools and object stores.

Toshiba's published figures for the 18TB SATA models are a typical sustained transfer rate of 268 MiB/s, 4.16W at idle, a workload rating of 550TB transferred per year and an MTTF of 2.5 million hours. The low idle draw matters on large shelves, where watts per terabyte add up. It is a nearline drive for backup, archive, file and object storage, and capacity tiers. Workloads that depend on fast random I/O belong on 10K or 15K SAS drives or SSDs.

The MG09ACA18TE has a SATA 6Gb/s interface and uses 512e formatting: 512-byte logical sectors on 4K physical sectors. Toshiba's 512e models include a persistent write cache that protects data in flight if power is lost suddenly. If your stack is 4K-native, the 4Kn part is MG09ACA18TA. Toshiba also sells Sanitize Instant Erase and self-encrypting versions, and a 12Gb/s SAS model (MG09SCA18TE) for dual-port enclosures. Each is a separate part number.

Before ordering, check the following:

• The drive ships bare. Hot-swap bays in servers, JBODs and NAS units need a tray, and HPE or Dell servers need OEM carriers and may flag non-OEM firmware.
• Your controller or NAS firmware supports 18TB drives and lists this model if the vendor publishes a compatibility list.
• You want the standard model. The SED version is MG09ACP18TE.
• All members of a RAID group use the same sector format.