Seagate has expanded its family of Exos Mach.2 hard drives that feature two actuators along with four new models offering higher capacity and increased performance. The new Exos 2X18 HDDs can match SATA solid-state drives really well in terms of sequential read and write speeds. It also offers capacities of 16TB and 18TB. 

The new family of Seagate Exos 2X18 consists of six models namely, two 18TB HDDs with a SATA 6 Gbps and SAS 12 Gbps interface and also two 16TB SKUs with the said interfaces. SAS drives always comes with encryption options. In the case of the performance, Seagate says that the Exos 2X18 SATA version boost with a maximum sustained transfer rate of 554 MBps and on the other hand, SAS models are rated for a maximum sustained transfer rate of 545 MBps. This refers to its being the world’s fastest HDD. All four drives feature an average latency of 4.16 ms as well as 304/560 random read/write IOPS (4K QD16). 

The dual-actuator drives make use of conventional magnetic recording featuring a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, a 256MB multisegmented cache, and fully support Seagate’s technologies for data centers that include PowerChoice, PowerBalance, and also hotplug support. Seagate’s hermetically sealed and helium-filled Mach.2 hard drives having two actuators are two logical HDDs that are addressable and thus require a few software tweaks on the host side. 

The advantage of multi-actuator HDDs is their higher per-TB sequential and random read performance that gets lower as the capacity of the hard drive increases. Increasing the number of actuators doubles the performance. But, at the same time, it comes at the cost of increased power consumption. The new Exos 2X18 HDDs from Seagate consume 7.8W/8W in idle as well as up to 13.5W/12.8W under heavy loads, which is in line with the first-gen Mach.2 HDDs. 

There has been an experiment led by Seagate with dual-actuator HDDs along with Microsoft from late 2017 but then the availability was increased to select other partners. With Exos 2X18, Seagate expands the availability of its Mach.2 HDDs. It is still not known whether or not such products will be available in retail to people wanting ultra-fast HDD but these SATA drives can be used with a wide range of systems than their predecessors. 

Since Seagate’s Exos 2X18 drives are designed for data centers, the company does not reveal its pricing as it relies 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. In the meantime, Seagate does not disclose the per annum TB workload rating for these HDDs.