Morning,

Saw an interesting news story today relating to some new HDDs from Seagate, boasting a maximum capacity of 18TB, these 7.2k RPM SATA/SAS hard drive, capable of a maximum sustained transfer rate of up to 554MBps.

For those interested it is the Seagate Exos Mach.2.

So how does it reach these alleged high speeds? Let’s dive in

Firstly, these hard drives have two actuators, with the disk capacity divided neatly in half between them. 

As always, the random IOPS falls through the floor with these disks, achieving 304 random read and 560 random write IOPS, tested at 4K Q16.

For the cache, it’s a 256MB multisegmented cache helping boost some of these numbers which isn’t that surprising.

These hard drives are designed for the datacenter, so pricing isn’t publicly shared and I don’t believe we’ll see these drives on shelves any time soon, and with power consumption of up to 13.5w under load, these will certainly be contributing some heat when used in bulky RAID Arrays. Whilst this certainly is a disadvantage vs the SSDs that they’re trying to compete against from a performance standpoint, the density benefits of HDDs certainly can’t be argued against, and they’d make for a great performance increase when used in high density demanding workloads such as backups!

Interested in the full specs? Check out the spec sheet of the new models below: