Seagate Launches 2nd Gen Dual-Actuator HDDs: 18TB at 554 MBps
Seagate lists Exos 2X18 hard drives.
Seagate has quietly expanded its family of Exos Mach.2 hard drives featuring two actuators with four new models that offer higher capacity and increased performance. The new Exos 2X18 HDDs can match SATA solid-state drives in terms of sequential read and write speeds while offering capacities of 16TB and 18TB (up from 14TB with previous generation).
The new Seagate Exos 2X18 family includes six models: two 18TB HDDs with a SATA 6 Gbps and SAS 12 Gbps interface as well as two 16TB SKUs with the said interfaces (via StorageReview). SAS drives are always offered with encryption option. As for performance, Seagate says that the Exos 2X18 SATA version boost with a maximum sustained transfer rate of 554 MBps, whereas SAS models are rated for a maximum sustained transfer rate of 545 MBps, which means that these are the world's fastest HDDs. All four drives also feature an average latency of 4.16 ms as well as 304/560 random read/write IOPS (4K QD16).
The dual-actuator drives use conventional magnetic recording, feature a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, a 256MB multisegmented cache, and fully support Seagate's technologies for datacenters, including PowerChoice (to manage idle power consumption), PowerBalance (to manage active power consumption), and hot plug support. Seagate's hermetically sealed and helium-filled Mach.2 hard drives with two actuators are essentially two logical HDDs (of 9TB or 8TB capacity) that are independently addressable and therefore need some software tweaks on the host side.
The key advantage of multi-actuator HDDs in addition to their higher performance compared to single-actuator hard drives is their higher per-TB sequential and random read performance that tends to get lower as hard drive capacity gets higher. Increasing the number of actuators that work independently essentially doubles performance, but this comes at the cost of increased power consumption. The new Exos 2X18 HDDs from Seagate consume 7.8W/8W in idle (SATA/SAS) as well as up to 13.5W/12.8W under heavy loads (SATA/SAS), which is in line with the first-generation Mach.2 HDDs.
Seagate has been experimenting with dual-actuator HDDs with Microsoft since late 2017, but then expanded availability to select other partners. With its Exos 2X18, Seagate probably further expands availability of its Mach.2 HDDs as now it makes them available with a widespread SATA interface. Whether or not such products will be available in retail to those who want an ultra-fast HDD is something that remains to be seen, but at least these SATA drives can be used with a wider range of systems than their predecessors.
Since Seagate's Exos 2X18 drives are designed primarily for datacenters, the company does not disclose their pricing since it heavily depends on volumes and actual configurations.
The new Mach.2 drives come with a five-year warranty and are designed to work in 24/7 environments. Meanwhile, Seagate does not disclose per annum TB workload rating for these HDDs.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
-
BX4096 How's Seagate's failure rates nowadays? I stopped buying from them entirely years ago, after I noticed that something like 80% of all my failed drives were by Seagate.Reply -
WrongRookie ReplyBX4096 said:How's Seagate's failure rates nowadays? I stopped buying from them entirely years ago, after I noticed that something like 80% of all my failed drives were by Seagate.
Still frequent I'm afraid..
https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/11/02/backblaze-find-seagate-disk-drives-fail-most-often/
Don't know about this year though.
Just imagine if they tried selling this but as firecuda/barracuda. Could give less reasons to go for sata SSDs of 2 or 4 tb.. -
NeatOman ReplyWrongRookie said:Still frequent I'm afraid..
https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/11/02/backblaze-find-seagate-disk-drives-fail-most-often/
Don't know about this year though.
Just imagine if they tried selling this but as firecuda/barracuda. Could give less reasons to go for sata SSDs of 2 or 4 tb..
That's still Massively better than it was before when they had to draw there warranties back to just a year o_O this was around the 2010's and WD went though a similar quality phase, but not nearly as bad imo. But going from over 10% on AVERAGE to about 2% is "good". But you're right, in comparison it's still 2x worse than the field. I still use the old Toshiba drives that where rebranded HSGT drives, and had effectively the same HSGT drives before that :whistle: and WD black back in the late 00's and good old Seagates when they where made as well as the best of them in the early mid 00's. -
bit_user Reply
WD made the smart move of buying HGST. It took a really long time to get them merged, but I think all of their HDDs are now HGST-designed.NeatOman said:WD went though a similar quality phase, but not nearly as bad imo. -
bit_user Reply
More than that, I expect.The_Git said:Why! it doubles the chance of failure.
I wonder how much they have to account for one actuator actually moving the drive. In the worst case, they might not be able to read or write while the other actuator is seeking.
That doesn't sound like what the article is saying.The_Git said:The dual actuator just means that you have a central Disk with 2 reading arms either side of it.
The article claims there are indeed performance benefits. Otherwise, what's the point?The_Git said:It certainly won't double reading time
Performance is really becoming an issue, as HDD capacities continue to scale. Backups and RAID rebuilds are now taking multiple days. -
Umfriend Reply
Actually, no. There is a single spindle but the actuators are located on top of each other. The advantage is that they can operate independent of each other, each on half of the platters. It's more like having 2 HDD inside one package or Raid-0 like.The_Git said:Why! it doubles the chance of failure. The dual actuator just means that you have a central Disk with 2 reading arms either side of it. It certainly won't double reading time, it adds complexity to the controller circuit, needs more Cache and has double the chance of failing due to power loss when the drive is reading or writing, or when the case receives shock whist in use.
Otherwise it is a decent Idea, like a multicore CPU. -
Kamen Rider Blade Reply
The whole point is Seagate needs to build in a internal RAID 0 to improve performance without me having to do anything.The_Git said:Why! it doubles the chance of failure. The dual actuator just means that you have a central Disk with 2 reading arms either side of it. It certainly won't double reading time, it adds complexity to the controller circuit, needs more Cache and has double the chance of failing due to power loss when the drive is reading or writing, or when the case receives shock whist in use.
Otherwise it is a decent Idea, like a multicore CPU.
That's the whole point of Multi-Actuator -
bit_user Reply
Yes, they need to find a way to improve HDD throughput within the confines of a standard 3.5" enclosure. The right way to think about this is improving HDD performance density.Kamen Rider Blade said:The whole point is Seagate needs to build in a internal RAID 0 to improve performance without me having to do anything.
That's the whole point of Multi-Actuator -
Kamen Rider Blade Reply
That happens naturally anyways, the biggest improvement in HDD is "Multi-Actuator".bit_user said:Yes, they need to find a way to improve HDD throughput within the confines of a standard 3.5" enclosure. The right way to think about this is improving HDD performance density.
The part they haven't leveraged is RAID 0 internally to maximize linear sustained throughput.
I'm not expecting Random Performance to increase, but linear throughput should increase dramatically.
Eventually, if you keep going down the "Multi-Acutator" tech tree, you could get to the point where every arm is individually moving and you are reading & writing from as many arms as possible to fulfill increased stacked throughput via internal RAID.