In fact, two 7Tb hard disks running in parallel within a single 3.5-inch enclosure.
For almost four years, Seagate has been promoting its so-called "Mach.2" hard drives. The goal of the famous storage unit manufacturer is to design a hard drive, if not able to compete with NVMe SSDs, at least to compete with SATA standard SSDs. The Mach.2 is no longer just a product of the future, a distant projection of Seagate, since the American has just presented a particularly efficient mass-produced unit, even if, alas, Seagate does not seem to have to market it to everyone for the moment.
The Mach.2 Exos 2X14 is the first product of the Mach.2 range actually presented to the public and we can say that it has interesting arguments to make. With a capacity of 14Tb, it reaches absolutely remarkable speeds for a standard hard disk: Seagate advances the figure of 524 Mb/s in sequential reading / writing! In other words, we are completely within the limits of SATA standard SSDs. However, Seagate can't do miracles and in random read/write, its Mach.2 has a ceiling of 304 and 448 IOPS respectively.
For several years now, hard disks have only been used for their capacities, which are much higher than those of SSDs. The Mach.2 is therefore not enough to compete with NVMe SSDs, but by reaching speeds of more than 500 MB/s in some cases, Seagate is undoubtedly taking a step in the right direction. To achieve this, the manufacturer has squeezed two 7TB 7,200 RPM hard drives into a single standard 3.5-inch enclosure. Each of these drives has its own 256MB cache and the power consumption is a bit higher than a standard 3.5-inch hard drive.
Senior Vice President, Business and Marketing at Seagate, Jeff Fochtman points out that the firm " started shipping Mach.2 hard drives as early as 2019." He says Seagate is now " expanding its customer base." The dual-actuator technology used here is not new, but Mach.2s look set to take it a step further, and Jeff Fochtman predicts a great future for it: " While Mach.2 is already very mature and in use, it's still a technology in the development phase. When we reach capacities above 30 TB, these HDDs will become standard solutions in many data centers. "
