Seagate Unveils Exos 2X18 World's Fastest Hard Drives with Speeds That Rival Some SSDs

Seagate Unveils Exos 2X18 World's Fastest Hard Drives with Speeds That Rival Some SSDs

Seagate can officially lay claim to offering the fastest mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) in the world, as it pertains to rated throughput. These latest additions to Seagate’s storage lineup are HDDs that are seriously impressive, in both capacity and speed and they arrive a year after Seagate introduced the first NVMe HDD.

Now Seagate is offering 18TB and 16TB capacities within the Exos 2X18 family, each available in a choice between SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps interfaces. The SATA HDD variants are actually a touch faster, though both are on par with SATA SSDs.

Seagate’s datasheets on these models reveal that the SATA models are capable of up to a 554MB/s sustained transfer rate, whereas the SAS drives are not far behind at 545MB/s. To put those numbers into perspective, the fastest SATA SSDs typically land in the range of 580MB/s.

Seagate’s magic lies within its MACH.2 multi-actuator technology that was introduced a few years ago. The Seagate Exos 2X18 HDD lineup features dual independent actuators to deliver up to a 2X performance gain over single-actuator drives.

Seagate explains that MACH.2 is the multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single HDD. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual HDD.

The new Seagate HDDs act as two 9TB or 8TB logical units, one for each actuator. But the two actuators can simultaneously transfer data to the host system, which reads the HDD drive as a single device. Other features of the new Seagate’s Exos 2X18 HDD include a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, 256MB of cache, support for SMART monitoring, and burst rates of up to 600MB/s.

The Seagate Exos 2X18 HDDs offer SSD performance in an 18 TB and 16 TB and can be the perfect fit for data centers running demanding applications. But they can be also vulnerable to physical HDD failures making critical user data inaccessible. In such situations, the owners of the Seagate Exos 2X18 HDDs will need to contact a professional data recovery services provider to restore their data. ACE Data Recovery team has extensive experience in recovering data from all types of storage media, including HDDs, and will gladly help the Seagate Exos 2X18 HDD owners with their data recovery needs.