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Scale-out NAS maker claims to be the first enterprise array maker to use multi-actuator HDDs designed for hyperscaler architectures and which double throughput

Fondly referred to as “spinning rust” among some computer nerds, mechanical hard drives seem almost quaint compared to hyper-fast SSDs. Yet, the idea that mechanical hard drives are ready for the trash pile may be more than a little premature.

Seagates Exos 2X18 features multiple drive heads that enable it to match SATA SSD speeds.

So somebody tweeted about the Seagate Mach.2, a harddisk with two independent heads “combs”, and I commented in german: “It’s two drives in one chassis, even shown as two drives. And it still is rotating rust, so slow with seeks. Linear IO will be fine.”

This is quite unexpected because SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs. The first flash-based SSDs used SATA/SAS physical interfaces borrowed from existing hard drive-based enterprise server/ storage systems. However, none of these interfaces and protocols were designed for high-speed storage media and the SATA/SAS bus became a bottleneck for the much faster SSD. The initial fix was SSDs on a PCI Express (PCIe) card. While much faster, PCIe was also proprietary and meant as a point-to-point transfer. A PCIe SSD in one server could not be directly accessed by any other serv...