Seagate announces the introduction of dual drive motor technology for mechanical hard drives: doubling read and write speeds

Mechanical hard drives are cheap and popular, but their weak read and write speeds and sensitive mechanical structures compared to SSDs have not been substantially improved for many years.

Although the theoretical speed of SATA3 interface is 6Gbps and SAS3 is 12Gbps, none of the mechanical hard drives can run at full capacity, and even reaching 50% is a luxury.

The image is from Seagate's official website, the same below

From the perspective of technological trends in recent years, the three giants Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba have all focused on developing magnetic recording technologies such as SMR (stacked tile), MAMR (microwave-assisted), and HAMR (thermally assisted), as well as multi disk stacking methods such as helium charging. However, few have explored speed boosting.

For example, all three major manufacturers have promised to release 40TB hard drives within 5 years. With an average speed of 250MB/s and good working conditions, it would take nearly two days to fill up without shutting down. It's really an exaggeration.

In fact, when mechanical hard drives are disassembled and crushed, they consist of three major components: the drive motor, the head+drive arm, and the disk. TMHW introduced that Seagate has officially introduced multi actuator technology to double the performance of HDDs.

To be frank, multi motor technology is not new, and it has been tossed around in the laboratory for many years. The biggest obstacle is the difficulty in reducing costs.

According to Seagate's latest demonstration, the dual motors can operate independently, with each motor arm equipped with 8 magnetic heads, and run coaxially after power on. However, the new motor requires additional actuator magnets and voice coil magnets, leading to speculation that it may result in an increase in weight and cost.

Compared to traditional 8-disk 16 head hard drives, dual motors mean that data can be transmitted/retrieved twice as much, doubling the read and write performance.

Seagate also emphasized that the dual motor can ultimately adapt to SAS, SATA, and even NVMe protocols.

However, the specific timeline is still unknown, and we hope that the giant's "bringing up old things again" behavior this time is not a show of existence, which means we really don't have to wait too long.