Seagate’s MACH.2 and HAMR HDD tech moves closer to market – Faster HDDs than ever before
Seagate’s MACH.2 and HAMR HDD tech moves closer to market
Seagate is a company that knows that the days of HDDs are far from over, for starters solid-state storage remains extremely expensive, making it terrible as a budget-friendly storage solution, especially when purchasing high capacity drives. The cost/GB of HDDs remains supreme for modern PCs, especially if Seagate can overcome some of the shortcomings of HDD technology.Â
As a company, Seagate is taking a two-pronged approach to improving HDDs, increasing drive capacities while also delivering enhanced performance. Seagate has confirmed that their HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and MACH.2 (Multi-Actuator) technologies have moved closer to market and will be available in future Exos enterprise hard drives.Â
Both HAMR and MACH.2 drives have been deployed to customers as development units, which will allow Seagate to conduct consumer testing before these drives become shipping products.Â
HAMR technology is designed to increase the capacity of modern hard drives, allowing storage densities to be raised by using smaller magnetic fields to read and write data. The problem with this technique is that smaller magnetic fields are not strong enough to write data, a problem which is solved by temporarily heating sections of a hard drive before every write, hence why HAMR is known as a “Heat Assisted” Magnetic Recording technology.Â
The downside of HAMR is reliability concerns, as continually heating and cooling a hard disk could cause drives to wear out prematurely. Seagate’s HAMR technology has been demonstrated to offer levels of reliability that are 20x higher than industry specifications, more than proving that the technology is industry ready.Â
MACH.2 Multi-Actuator technology solves the speed problems that have plagued hard drives for decades, replacing today’s single actuator HDD designs to double the read/write IOPS performance of a single HDD. Seagate has demonstrated sustained speeds of 480MB/s using a MACH.2 HDD, offering a 60% performance boost over a high-speed 15K RPM HDD.Â
In some regards, a MACH.2 hard drive acts like a two-disk RAID-0 array inside a single drive, offering double the IOPS performance of a single drive. This change allows MACH.2 HDDs to provide higher performance levels, which will become extremely useful in today’s data-driven society. While this doesn’t bring HDDs to SATA SSD performance levels, it is more than enough to inject some new life into the HDD standard.Â
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Seagate’s MACH.2 and HAMR technologies will allow Seagate to create HDDs that are larger and faster than ever before, creating products that will become highly sought after in the enterprise market, offering the affordability of traditional HDDs while also offering notable capacity and performance boosts per drive.
You can join the discussion on Seagate’s MACH.2 and HAMR technologies on the OC3D Forums. Â