Seagate’s New Multi-Actuator Could Double Hard Drive Speeds

The humble hard drive doesn’t get much

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respect these days. Once SSDs started hitting the consumer market, it quickly became clear there was no way hard drive performance would compete in the long term. Hard drive capacities have continued to grow, thanks to new recording technologies and the use of helium inside the drives themselves, but performance improvements have been minimal. Seagate plans to change that in the near future, with new technology that could double hard drive performance.

There are several ways to improve hard drive performance. Fifteen years ago, Western Digital launched various 7200 RPM drives with a larger cache (8MB compared with 2MB on an 80GB drive). All HDDs today use memory caches, even if the ratio of cache size to disk size has fallen sharply.

The next way to increase HDD performance is to increase the rate at which the drive spins. A drive spinning at 15,000 RPM will obviously outperform a drive spinning at 7200 RPM, assuming identical firmware and workloads. But spinning a drive faster comes with its own set of problems: Such drives are obviously louder, it’s harder to build components that can withstand the higher spin rate, and 10K or 15K drives draw more power than their 7200 RPM cousins.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/260946-seagates-new-multi-actuator-technology-double-hard-drive-speeds