Seagate has finally unveiled the specifications on its upcoming dual actuator hard drives. The Mach.2 drive family will be introduced with the Mach.2

Seagate Specs the Mach.2, the World’s Fastest Hard Drive

submited by
Style Pass
2021-05-22 07:00:02

Seagate has finally unveiled the specifications on its upcoming dual actuator hard drives. The Mach.2 drive family will be introduced with the Mach.2 Exos 2X14. The hard drive offers 14TB of capacity in “two independently addressable 7TB logical units.”

The 3.5-inch 12Gb/s SAS drive is capable of a maximum sequential transfer rate of 524MB/s, which is substantially faster than any other hard drive on the market. While the 7200 RPM spindle speed isn’t particularly fast compared with the 10K and 15K drives that exist already, Seagate’s dual actuator technology outperforms them all.

Seagate’s Exos 15E900 is a 2.5-inch 900GB HDD with lower claimed latency (2ms compared with 4ms) but a sequential transfer rate of 210-300MB/s. The company’s higher capacity enterprise Exos HDDs claim up to 270MB/s in sequential transfer rates. The 524MB/s for the Exos 2X14 is high enough to match or exceed the performance of early SATA SSDs, though these, of course, are scarcely the competition.

Seagate actually goes into some detail on why it brought dual actuator drives to market. Hard drives have typically gotten faster in three ways: Increased spindle speeds, the integration of drive cache, and command queueing. Hard drives hit 7200 RPM with Seagate’s Barracuda 1 in 1992, drive caches were popularized by drives like the WD800JB in 2002, and Seagate introduced Native Command Queueing (NCQ) support for HDD’s in 2004. Now, in 2021, we’ve got dual actuator drives.

Leave a Comment