Seagate Exus Mach.2 Announced; World's Fastest Hard Drive?

As SSDs have gotten a lot cheaper and faster over the last few years, they have taken over the HDD market in almost every territory. Seagate, the brand known for memory devices has made a product that might resurrect the HDDs with the launch of the Seagate Exus Mach.2, dubbed as the world's fastest hard drive.

The brand has incorporated a second set of read/write heads on the Exus Mach.2, which are generally called actuators. This is the first hard drive with dual actuators, thus doubling the read/write speed of a hard drive. This means the Mach.2 comes at a cost of higher power consumption of 7.2W in the idle condition, which is almost 2.2W more than Seagate's Ironwolf lineup of HDDs.

According to the company, the Exus Mach.2 can offer a peak sequential data transfer rate (read speed)of 524MBps. On top of that, Mach.2 can also offer 304 IOPS read / 384 IOPS when it comes to random I/O performance with an average latency of 4.16 ms. These numbers do confirm that the Seagate Exus Mach.2 will offer at least double the performance when compared to a typical HDD on both sequential and random data transfer speeds.

So, if we compile the power consumption vs performance, the Exus Mach.2 offers almost double the performance with just 50 percent more power consumption, which makes it power efficient and practical. The company has confirmed that it has been shipping Exus March.2 since 2019 for select enterprises and is likely to expand the customer base with this official announcement.

If you are an end-user, then, you might have to wait for a few more months, as there is no information regarding the availability of the Mach.2 for the end-users. Enterprises have a choice of buying the Seagate Exus Mach.2 directly from the company.

The Seagate Exus Mach.2 is available with 144TB capacity, which uses dual 7TB logical units and it comes in a 3.5-inch form factor. The Mach.2 is likely to be priced less than SSDs of similar capacity and will cost a bit more when compared to the price of a typical HDD. At this capacity, an HDD makes a lot of sense, as one might have to spend a lot to get an SSD with a 14TB storage capacity.