Seagate details MACH.2 dual-actuator HDDs

While hard disk drives are quickly disappearing in the consumer market, the technology will likely stick around for a lot longer in the datacenter market. Seagate just presented the specifications of its Exos 15E900 -- world's first HDD with dual-actuator technology.

It's the biggest advancement in HDD technology since the introduction of Native Command Queueing (NCQ) in 2004. According to Seagate, a disk with the MACH.2 technology offers a real-world performance increase of 1.85x to 2x.

The new dual-actuator model uses the 12Gbps SAS interface and offers 14TB of storage capacity. Seagate says the disk should be regarded as a model with two "independently addressable 7TB logical units." In terms of read performance, the MACH.2 disk offers performance similar to old SATA SSDs. ExtremeTech goes over the details over here.

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.

Last year, enterprise HDD sales rose 1.9 percent. The HDD market as a whole dropped 18.2 percent.