We’ve spent years seeing how sales of mechanical hard drives or hard drives keep dropping. These drives have only one advantage over SSDs, which is capacity, other aspects are worse. But, Seagate refuses to Hard disk die and create one able to compete with solid-state drives.
The problem with hard drives is precisely the mechanical parts they have. On the one hand, we have read/write heads and spinning disks. Both elements limit operating speeds, being much slower than SSDs or so it was until now.
Seagate announces first MACH.2-based hard drives
Until the advent of SSDs, computer performance was determined by HDDs. Windows or game loading times were affected by their slow transfer speeds. Gradually they were 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 hard drives, Seagate does not want to see them die. Some time ago, I introduced special drives that offered transfer speeds of up to 300MB/s. Now, Seagate announce the MACH.2 Technologywhich is a multiple actuator system for compete with SSDs.
Basically what is done is to split the actuators into two groups which operate independently. With this simple trick, you can double the performance without much effort.
The ace Exos 2 X14 units will be the first to use the MACH.2 Technology second generation. These units have a 14TB capacity
Seagate manages to match the performance of SSDs based on the SATA interface. Thus, they manage to eliminate one of the great shortcomings of HDDs compared to SSDs, namely performance. What is achieved with this technology is that it makes hard drives much more attractive.
Could this be the resurgence of hard drives?
It seems quite complicated that hard drives can regain strength today. Although this is an important step, it is still difficult for them to become popular again. Keep in mind that the performance of SATA SSDs is matched, 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 affecting capacity. Even these types of units are great for mounting mass storage systems, but nothing else.
It doesn’t look like we’re going to see commercial units with this new technology. The reason is that it makes storage units more expensive. It seems difficult for users to buy a hard disk that offers more capacity and performance if it is twice as expensive as a disk with the same capacity but less performance.
