Seagate has at last got around to listing the first products featuring its Mach.2 multi-actuator HDD technology. HEXUS first covered this "performance breakthrough" technology back in December 2017, and the following March noted that demo versions of these drives were achieving 480MB/s transfers, and were at that time in the hands of Seagate's leading customers for evaluation purposes. Now, halfway through 2021, we see that Seagate has started to list (PDF) the first Mach.2 products, but they are still targeting 'select customers' in the enterprise market only, so we don't have any idea about general availability or pricing.
The new 14TB Seagate Exos 2X14 uses Mach.2 technology to achieve up to 2x performance of an enterprise single-actuator 3.5-inch HDD. Seagate's claimed 524MB/s is actually in line with fast SATA-based SSDs that are available nowadays – better than its claims from three years back. Other key performance stats are the Random read/write IOPS of 304/384, and the average latency of 4.16ms (both these metrics look very poor compared to any SSD).
A Seagate Exos 2X14 will consume about 7W on average, peaking at 13.4W under load – and these figures are a little above contemporary HDDs, but remember this is really a twin Helium-sealed 7200RPM 7GB HDD in a 3.5-inch form factor. Seagate says these drives have an MTBF of 2,500,000 hours, and sells them with a five-year warranty.
According to Seagate's roadmap, it has already started supplying 18TB Mach.2 drives to its favoured customers. Between 2023 and 2026 it expects to boost maximum capacities from 30 to 50TB or more. It is hard to know if/when Mach.2 drives will become available to consumers.
Seagate's stock valuation has recently seen some rapid gains as Chia crypto miners race to bulk buy the highest capacity drives they can. The whole cryptocurrency trend has been cooling-off in recent days though, so we have seen the stock price come back from its peaks.
