We have been seeing for years how sales of mechanical hard drives or HDDs are continuously falling. These units only have one advantage over SSDs, which is capacity, the rest of the aspects are worse. But, Seagate refuses to let them hdd die and have created one capable of competing with SSD drives.
The problem with hard drives is precisely the mechanical parts they have. On the one hand, we have the read/write heads and the spinning disks. Both elements limit operating speeds, being much slower than SSDs or at least, that was the case to date.
Seagate announces the first HDDs based on MACH.2
Until the arrival of SSDs, the performance of computers was conditioned by HDDs. Load times of Windows or games were affected by their slow transfer speeds. Little by little they have been left in the background, for massive data storage and little else. The Xbox Series X and PS5 already only use SSDs and finding a laptop with an HDD is very rare.
But when it comes to HDDs, Seagate is not willing to see them die. Some time ago I introduced special drives that offered transfer speeds of up to 300MB/s. Now, Seagate announces the MACH.2 technologywhich is a multiple actuator system for compete with SSDs.
Basically, what is done is to divide the actuators into two groups that work independently. With this simple trick you can double the performance without much effort.
The Exos units 2 X14 They will be the first to make use of the MACH.2 technology second generation. These units have a 14TB capacity with a disk rotation speed of 7200 RPM. These units will offer a read speed up to 524MB/s and write speeds of up to 500 MB/s, with a seek time of just 4 ms.
Seagate manages to match the performance of SSDs based on a SATA interface. In this way they manage to eliminate one of the great gaps that HDDs have with respect to SSDs, which is performance. What is achieved with this technology is that it makes HDDs much more attractive.
Could it be the resurgence of HDDs?
It seems quite complicated that hard drives can regain strength today. Although it is a great milestone, it is still difficult for them to end up being popular again. We must bear in mind that the performance of SATA SSDs is equal, those based on PCIe are light years away and are unmatched by an HDD.
Note that the Samsung Exos are designed for servers and Data Centers. This is great news for this segment as you get a performance boost without compromising capacity. Even these types of units are excellent for mounting mass storage systems, but little else.
It does not seem that we are going to see commercial units with this new technology. The reason is that it generates an increase in the cost of storage units. It seems difficult for users to buy a hard drive that offers more capacity and performance, if it is twice as expensive as a unit of the same capacity, but worse performance.
