Seagate Reveals 524 MB/s Mach.2 Exos 2X14 HDD!

Seagate is well-known for its high-end storage drives, and it seems they’re eager to keep hold of that reputation. They’ve just revealed the fastest HDD on the market, the 14TB Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14! Seagate has created a drive with huge capacity and speed by combining dual 7TB drives within a helium-filled 3.5″ HDD form factor. Amazingly, it uses a standard 7200 RPM spindle speed with 256 MB cache. However, with this, it’s able to boast a 524 MB/s sustained transfer rate (outer diameter) of 304/384 random read/write IOPS and a 4.16 ms average latency.

It’s unlikely you’ll be dropping one of these into your PC soon, though, as they use the SAS 12 Gb/s interface rather than SATA. With that in mind, your systems would actually detect this as two separate drives. With this kind of speed and being a clever dual-drive design, it’ll use more power than a typical HDD, but that’s to be expected. It’ll use 7.2W in idle and up to 13.5W under heavy load. However, it deploys PowerBalance features to help keep that within the 12W one would expect from a 3.5″ drive, but that can impact performance, so it’s up to you to balance this.

Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 HDD

Availability

It’s obviously targeted at data centres right now, and it’ll likely prove a popular product offer big capacities, and massive speed boosts for this form factor. It won’t be cheap, but I bet the price per GB and per MB/s is a heck of a lot better than solid-state storage.

However, it’s fantastic to see HDD still has a lot to offer and can now outpace your typical 2.5″ SATA 3 SSD. Of course, SSD tech has now moved into M.2, NMVe and other faster worlds too. No doubt, we’ll see similar technologies filter down to the consumer level over the coming years.