In the near future, Seagate plans to equip HDDs with two actuators. Each actuator will control half of the disk's arms, a feat that should double the performance while maintaining the same storage capacity.
In its first generation, Seagate’s Multi Actuator technology will equip hard drives with dual actuators (two actuators). With two actuators operating on a single pivot point, each actuator will control half of the drive’s arms. Half the drive’s recording heads will operate together as a unit, while the other half will operate independently as a separate unit. This enables a hard drive to double its performance while maintaining the same capacity as that of a single actuator drive.Further details about how this tech works can be read at the Seagate blog.
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Seagate’s new Multi Actuation technology is a way to put the performance of parallelism within a single hard drive unit. The host computer can treat a single Dual Actuator drive as if it were two separate drives. This means the host computer can ask a single high-capacity drive to retrieve two different data requests simultaneously — delivering data up to twice as fast compared with a single-actuator drive.