According to details provided by Seagate, the 3.5-inch 14TB helium-filled Exos X14 features Seagate's  MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology which actually doubles IOPS performance in a single hard drive by using two independent actuators and enabling parallelism of data flows from a single hard drive. Demonstrated at the OCP summit, Seagate's Exos X14 managed to hit a sustained throughput of 480MB/s, which is the fastest ever from a single hard drive and 60 percent faster than a 15k drive.

“MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology is an IOPS-per-Terabyte win for Seagate and for our cloud provider partners,” said Tony Glavis, Seagate marketing initiative manager for Enterprise applications, discussing the collaboration with Microsoft. “Our purpose is to accelerate technology innovation for performance in the cost-sensitive storage tier — and MACH.2 does that by solving response time for the end user and enabling our cloud partners to attain SLA requirements. Continued advances in capacity with HAMR and increased IOPS with MACH.2 work together to improved cost efficiencies while sustaining performance.”

In addition to the MACH.2 technology, the Exos X14 will also feature Seagate's new HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology with read/write heads that have achieved impressive reliability results, surpassing requirements by a factor of 20.

The industry standard stands at 550TB per year, or 2750TB over a 5-year period, which means that an HDD with 18 read/write heads, each head should take care of 152TB in those five years. According to Seagate, its new HAMR read/write head hits 3.2 Petabytes on a single head, which is more than 20 times the amount of data compared to the industry standard.

“On any hard drive meeting the industry specification, if all heads on the drive were writing 100 percent of the time in the field — which, of course, they do not — that would mean each head had written 152TB per head in total,” explained Jason Feist, Seagate’s director of Enterprise Product Planning. “Or to put it into Petabytes: the customer requirement is that a single head can write 0.152 Petabytes; we’re already writing 3.2 Petabytes on a single HAMR head.”

Unfortunately, we do not know if similar technologies will eventually get to consumer HDDs, but as far as Exos X14 is concerned, Seagate notes that these are currently sampling to select customers with production availability expected this summer.