Seagate has launched its first MACH.2-based HDD with a massive capacity of 14 TB and transfer speeds of up to 525MB/s. That’s pretty much on par with SATA-class SSDs. This has been done by essentially combining two HDDs into one. The Seagate Exos 2×14 as the name suggests contains two 7 TB HDD platters housed in a single helium-sealed 3.5-inch chassis. Instead of a single actuator (head), the drive also consists of two which doubles the read/write throughput.
Despite this, the drive still looks like a regular 3.5″ HDD, all the while featuring the capabilities of two. The OS recognizes it as two logical drives, each of which can be accessed independently. As per Seagate’s official specs, the Exos 2×14 has a peak transfer speed of up to 524 MB/s, with random reads/writes coming up to 304/384 IOPs. The drive has a 12Gb/s SAS interface, with a spinning speed of 7,200 rpm, a multi-segmented cache of 256MB, and an average latency of 4.16 ms. It has an MTBF of 2,500,000 hours, with a reliability rating @ 24×7 operation of 0.35%.
The increased performance does come at the cost of higher power consumption. The Exos 2×14 draws 7.2W while idle which increases to 13.5W under heavy load. Seagate is marketing its PowerBalance technology for data centers to improve its efficiency, although at the cost of performance. The drive is slated to launch in the first week of June with a sticker price of $589.99.
