Toshiba offers a new hard disk lineup, bringing 8TBs of storage to your desktop

By Jayce Wagner February 15, 2017

toshiba mn series hdds hard drive disk computer storage — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Ever want to put an aircraft hangar inside your desktop? Well, you can soon with Toshiba’s absolutely massive 8TB consumer-grade hard disks in the 3.5-inch format. Announced on Wednesday, Toshiba’s new MN series HDDs bridge the gap between enterprise-level storage capacity and high-performing desktop hard disks.

The MN series models come in three sizes — 8TB, 6TB, and 4TB, each one spins at 7,200RPM. In short, these HDDs aren’t just big, they are fast enough for daily use, performing well enough to serve as a backup hard disk in a home desktop or long-term storage solution for a small business.

The MN series offers up archival storage capacities large enough to house each and every one of those family photo albums, alongside all those movies you’re not currently watching. A credit to their enterprise heritage, the MN series HDDs are designed for always-on performance, with rotational vibration compensation to keep your data safe and stable.

“Many customers with predominantly file-oriented and fixed-content sequential write and read workloads are looking for cost-effective capacities for moderate workload storage applications,” said Scott Wright, director of HDD marketing for Toshiba America.

Ultimately what that means, is these new MN series hard disks aren’t just designed for long-term backup storage, their read and write speeds are fast enough that they can live inside a desktop workstation or family computer. Typically hard drives with this kind of storage capacity trade in functional speed for expanded capacity, making them unsuitable for day-to-day use.

Toshiba claims the MN series is a different breed of a high-capacity hard disk, the 8TB, 6TB, and 4TB drives can be slotted into a standard desktop without any difficulty. That way you can use a faster, smaller, SSD for applications and games, while you let the Toshiba MN series take care of archival and spill-over storage.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

A staff writer for the Computing section, Jayce covers a little bit of everything -- hardware, gaming, and occasionally VR.

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