Seagate introduced the world’s fastest mechanical hard drive, the Mach.2 Exos 2X14. By using two heads with heads, the new drive is able to double the amount of data transferred, achieving read and write speeds comparable to those of some SSD drives.
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For several years, Seagate has been working on the use of two independently operating sets of arms and read / write heads in hard drives. The result of this work, the first Mach.2 drive has just been unveiled on the company’s website and is available for purchase by “selected customers” according to a Seagate announcement. There is nothing surprising in this – these types of drives are intended for industrial customers who will use them in data centers, and not for individual users.
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Despite the absolute supremacy of SSDs in terms of read and write speeds and, above all, speed of access, traditional HDDs still offer an incomparably better price per gigabyte and are used in data centers for data storage.
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The factor limiting their possibilities is the speed with which the head arm is able to move to the area where the reading or writing is to take place. When reading / writing data physically located in different places on the disk, the time of head positioning begins to play a very important role.
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The idea behind Seagate is to add a second set of heads, moving on a separate arm, thus obtaining much more flexibility and practically doubling the speed of the whole operation.
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The total capacity of the 14TB Mach.2 Exos 2X14 drive consists of two disks with a capacity of 7TB each, enclosed in a hermetic casing filled with helium reducing resistance. The 7200 RPM disk is equipped with a 256 MB cache memory and a single-port 12Gbps SAS interface.
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Seagate I Double the Performance of Data-Intensive Applications with MACH.2
According to the manufacturer’s data, the Exos 2X14 is capable of data transfer rates of 524 MBps, 304/384 IOPS read / write, and has an average latency of 4.16 ms. These parameters make it the fastest HDD in the world and allow it to compete in terms of sequential write / read speeds with cheaper SSDs with SATA / SAS interfaces.
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According to Seagate, the drive needs quite a lot of power, consuming 7.2W in IDLE mode and even up to 13.5W under load. This is significantly more than in the case of other drives of similar purpose, also more than the 12W recommended for 3.5 “HDDs, but according to the manufacturer, this can be compensated by using the energy management software provided by Seagate.
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The Exos 2X14 has a much greater increase in efficiency than electricity consumption, so you can still make savings when converting the efficiency to the energy required to obtain it.
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