Skip to main content

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

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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Jaina Grey
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jaina Grey is a Seattle-based journalist with over a decade of experience covering technology, coffee, gaming, and AI. Her…
Google Gemini among the top three AI services, with 350 million monthly users
A person using Google Gemini on the Google Pixel 9a.

Details about Google’s Gemini user base have been revealed in an unceremonious fashion, indicating that the brand’s AI chatbot has garnered approximately 350 million monthly active users and 35 million daily active users as of March 2025. 

The Information uncovered court documents from an ongoing antitrust case involving the company, which revealed that the Gemini chatbot saw user growth from 9 million daily users or 90 million monthly in October 2024, to approximately 35 million daily users by early 2025.

Read more
Microsoft has revealed one of its recent ads uses gen AI — can you tell?
Shot from a Microsoft advert.

In January, Microsoft released a minute-long advert for its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. It currently has 42,000 views on YouTube with 302 comments discussing the hardware -- what the comments don't mention, however, is the AI-generated shots used in the ad. Why? Because no one even realized AI was involved until Microsoft smugly revealed it this week.

You can tell the company is proud of this little stunt it's pulled off because the blog about it begins with a dramatic summary of the history of film and how it has evolved -- implying generative AI tools are the next step in this grand evolution.

Read more
New AMD laptop GPUs have leaked, and Nvidia might be in trouble
A woman sits by a desk and plays a game on a laptop equipped with an AMD processor.

AMD has recently launched some of its best graphics cards for desktops, what with the arrival of the RX 9070 XT and the non-XT model -- but laptop gamers haven't had anything to look forward to. That might be about to change, as a new leak tells us that AMD is preparing a whopping six laptop GPUs, and that list includes an unexpected model.

The scoop comes from All The Watts on X (Twitter), who -- in their usual manner -- shared a rather cryptic message containing GPU specs. Each model is followed by an "M," indicating that this is the RX 9000 series for laptops, and it's actually bigger than the desktop lineup is so far. What's more, it's actually larger than the desktop lineup might ever be, seeing as that one is only supposed to get three new GPUs at some point.

Read more