Announced MACH.2 technology by Seagate, which implements two read heads for platters, allowing HDDs to reach speeds of up to 480MB / s.

Hard drives have an advantage and a disadvantage over SSDs. The problem is that HDDs are very slow, four to eight times slower than an SSD, but the capacity is much higher than SSDs. To solve this problem, Seagate has developed MACH.2 technology, which will allow solid state hard drives to reach transfer speeds of 480MB / s. Initially, this technology will be implemented in Exos hard drives, designed for the professional sector.

This technology is based on the implementation of a multi-actuator system, which makes it possible to take advantage of the parallel reading of data by means of two currents that move independently and that allow data to be read and written on two levels of plates.

Seagate has already said that this technology is still under development and that for the future they plan to further improve the speed of mechanical hard drives by introducing more than two actuators for next generations of MACH.2. Not only is the sequential read and write speed increased, the random read and write speed of small files has also been doubled, which is measured in IOPS.

They have combined this technology with heat-assisted magnetic recording technology or HAMR for its acronym in English, which is a technology that allows to significantly increase the density of bits per platter and is also a very reliable type of writing. The first HAMR and MACH.2 hard drives will be combined for the professional segment.

The MACH.2 technology looks very good and if they were to implement a head per platter, which allow independent performance of these, we could see how the SSDs are completely ridiculous in terms of operating speeds.

Source: Guru3D