Despite the fact that the mechanical hard drive industry is undoubtedly in the doldrums, major manufacturers continue to work to bring them back to consumer purchase incentives, and now Seagate seems to have made a huge move with its new hard drive. Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 mechanical, with 14 TB of capacity and a speed that resembles and even exceeds that of many SATA SSDs: 524 MB/s.
The greatest incentive that traditional hard drives continue to have a reason for being is their capacity, and more specifically their price-per-GB ratio, which today is still a long way from SSDs. The downside of this type of device is that despite providing capacities hardly achievable by consumer SSDs, they are still quite slow in comparison... at least until now.
The mechanical hard drive with SSD speed: Seagate Exos 2X14
What Seagate has done in this hard drive is to integrate a system of two HDDs of 7 TB each in a 3.5-inch chassis full of Helium, which as you can imagine works with an internal RAID 0 system . The unit has a standard rotation speed of 7200 RPM, offers 256 MB of cache and uses a 12 Gbps SAS interface to work (so as you will already suppose, it is initially oriented to the business market); according to the manufacturer, the system will recognize the drive as two independently addressable logical drives if the user so wishes.
The Seagate Exos 2X14 hard drive offers a sustained transfer rate of up to 524 MB/s , a random read and write rate of 304/384 IOPS respectively, and an average latency of 4.16ms, but of course being a solution hard drive (as much as it has theoretical SSD speed) with turntables and actuators, the random performance is its weakest point and therefore it is not an ideal drive for high workload environments with many requests per second (such as for example for large databases).
It is understandable that the power consumption has increased in this solution, since its theoretical consumption is 7.2 watts at rest and 13.5 watts under heavy load, since as we have mentioned before it integrates two hard drives inside. Seagate offers its PowerBalance features built into this hard drive, which are intended to reduce power consumption within the 12-watt power envelope typically associated with 3.5-inch hard drives, but Seagate cautions that this may reduce power. performance of up to 50% for sequential reads and up to 10% for random reads.
For now, Seagate has not indicated the availability or price of this hard drive, but as we have already mentioned, having a SAS interface is surely oriented to the business market. But you already know how this works: the manufacturer has managed to integrate into the market a fairly important novelty that initially goes to the business market, but if things work well, it won't take long to reach the consumer market, so potentially it is quite a lot. We may start to see this SSD-performing hard drive in the consumer market not long from now.
