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.
