EC News DeskSeagate’s MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology has enabled the company to set a new hard drive speed record, demonstrating up to 480MB/s sustained throughput, the fastest ever. Seagate recently introduced its MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology in the world’s first dual actuator hard drives, for customer testing prior to productisation.
Seagate’s advanced engineering team also announced a breakthrough in the demonstrated reliability of its HAMR, Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, technology hard drives. Seagate revealed that its HAMR read/write heads have achieved unprecedented results in long-term reliability tests that surpass customer requirements by a factor of 20.
Philippe Vaillant, Engineering Manager for Europe, Seagate Technology, notes that the whole idea for MACH 2 is to increase the performance at the drive level. A drive can deliver roughly 200 IOPS per TB and functionally for enterprise applications there is a need to provide a minimum of 10 IOPS per TB.
In order to increase the IOPS in the simplest way is to add another actuator. By doubling the number of actuators, Seagate can IOPS two-fold. In short, the company designed the MACH 2 for customers who have IOPS-per-terabyte quality-of-service requirements that can no longer be met by single-actuator drives.
Meanwhile, HAMR addresses capacity-related issues and not performance. It helps increase the amount of data that can be stored on a hard drive. Earlier, Seagate used PMR, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, which could help it achieve upto 18TB. Achieving more than 18TB required newer technologies. So, Seagate used a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable.
Adds Vaillant, “We will have an evolution unit by the end of 2020. With HAMR we will be able to provide a 20TB product and upto 60TB in the near future.”
