January, 2018

Seagate doubles down on HDD speeds with Multi-Actuator technology

Hard drive capacities have continued to grow thanks to the new recording technologies and the use of helium inside the drives themselves. However, the performance improvements have been minimal. Seagate plans to change that in the near future with new Multi-Actuator technology that will allow two sets of data to be written or read from the same drive at the same time and double hard drive performance.

In a conventional hard disk drive, data is written to and read from a surface by way of a series of magnetic heads attached to an arm. An actuator moves these heads up and down, usually as one group. Seagate's plan to improve performance sounds simple enough: use two actuators, each capable of operating independently from the other.

Hard drives that use the company's Multi-Actuator technology will have two independent arms, allowing these devices to process two sets of data simultaneously. The drives will be able to run two different read or write operations at once. They will also perform two commands in parallel and write from one head while reading from the other. The Multi-Actuator technology can effectively double the performance of the hard drives, which is crucial for future data centers that will need to access more and more information.

According to Seagate, the Multi-Actuator technology is in development and will appear in products in the near future. In the long-term Seagate wants to expand up to four simultaneous actuators, potentially doubling transfer rates again.

Seagate says that by choosing higher-capacity hard drives with Multi-Actuator technology, IT architects will enjoy the performance benefits of parallelism while retaining the benefits of deploying high capacity hard drives, including lower acquisition cost-per-TB and reduced footprint costs.

Unfortunately, high-capacity hard drives based on the latest technologies are also vulnerable to physical and logical failures that may result in critical files inaccessibility. Data recovery from hard drives that use the Multi-Actuator technology can be too challenging for the majority of the US data recovery companies. ACE Data Recovery team enjoys challenges and ACEs are ready to deal with hard drives that use such technology.

ACE Data Recovery engineers are extensively experienced in recovering lost data from any type of hard drives and are equipped to handle any data recovery process. ACEs can develop highly-specific solutions for unusual cases to ensure safe and successful data recovery. ACE Data Recovery team makes the best choice when you need to recover data from any failed storage media.