Seagate has announced a brand-new hard drive called ‘Mach.2’ and it is the world’s fastest conventional hard drive. The Seagate Mach.2 hard drive has been in the works for quite a while and the key to Mach.2’s increased performance is the second set of actuator arms, which can be positioned independently from the first set. Essentially, this makes Mach.2 “two drives in one chassis.”
The company has been working on dual-actuator hard drives for several years. These are drives with two independently controlled sets of read/write heads. Its first production dual-actuator drive.
Image Credit: Seagate
Seagate lists the sustained, sequential transfer rate of Mach.2 as up to 524MBps. That is easily double that of a fast normal hard disk and edging into SATA SSD territory. The performance gains extend into random I/O territory as well, with 304 IOPS read / 384 IOPS write and only 4.16 ms average latency. Normal hard drives tend to be 100/150 IOPS and about the same average latency.
However, hard drives also require more power than traditional hard drives. Mach.2 drives are rated for 7.2 W idle, while Seagate’s standard Ironwolf line is rated at 5 W idle. Seagate has also spec’d the power draw for the Mach.2 drive differently.
The Mach.2’s power consumption is explicitly rated for several random I/O scenarios, while the Ironwolf line is rated for an unhelpful “average operating power”.
Mach.2 represents an excellent choice for power efficiency since it offers roughly 200% of the performance of competing for traditional drives at roughly 144% of the power budget. Particularly power-conscious users can also use Seagate’s PowerBalance mode—although that feature decreases sequential performance by 50% and random performance by 10%.
According to Seagate Senior VP of Business and Marketing Jeff Fochtman, the company has been shipping Mach.2 HDDs in volume since 2019, supplying them to over a dozen major enterprise customers with dual-actuator programs.
Last year, Seagate also released the Exos 18TB Hard Drive that was also aimed at corporate users and enterprises.
Mach.2, is now “available to select customers,” meaning that enterprises can buy it directly from Seagate, but end-users are out of luck for now.
