Toshiba MG10ACA20TE 20TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5in MG10 Series Hard Drive

The Toshiba MG10ACA20TE is the 20TB, 512e SATA drive in the MG10 Series. Toshiba moved from nine disks to ten in this generation, sealed in helium inside a standard 3.5-inch, 26.1mm housing, and kept conventional magnetic recording (CMR) by using its FC-MAMR technology. The drive runs at 7200 RPM and has a 512MiB buffer.

According to Toshiba's series data, the 20TB SATA model draws 4.38W at idle, sustains up to 268 MiB/s (typical), carries a workload rating of 550TB transferred per year and has an MTTF of 2.5 million hours. That profile points to capacity work: cloud-scale and rack-scale storage, file and object stores, backup and data protection systems, compliance archives and tiered storage where a flash or 10K SAS tier handles the hot data. It is not designed to compete with those tiers on random I/O.

This part number is the standard SATA 6Gb/s model in 512e format, which presents 512-byte logical sectors on 4K physical sectors and includes Toshiba's persistent write cache for protection against sudden power loss. Related models are separate parts: MG10ACA20TA for 4Kn, MG10ACA20TEY with Sanitize Instant Erase, MG10ACP20TE as a self-encrypting drive and MG10SCA20TE with a SAS interface. SATA runs on SATA ports and behind most SAS controllers, but it will not give dual-path redundancy in a dual-controller shelf.

Check these points before you order:

• Firmware support for 20TB drives on your HBA, RAID controller or NAS.
• Trays: the MG10ACA20TE is a bare drive. HPE and Dell servers require OEM carriers and may flag drives without OEM firmware.
• RAID design: with 20TB members, dual parity or erasure coding is the usual way to cover long rebuild windows.
• Sector format: keep 512e and 4Kn drives in separate groups.