Ancient technology is refined down to the last atom. It might seem that turntables should have been rotting in the dustbin of history long ago, but somewhere. They still have their place in the PC.
Of course it has to do with capacity. If you have, for example, a 12TB disk in your PC and you would like to replace the same capacity with an SSD, you will have negative pressure on the clipboard. Data hoarders are therefore still forced to use stone age technology (if they have anything to do with the price-performance-capacity ratio), while geeks and ordinary users may already switch completely to SSDs. But what if you want a bunch of terabytes and the speed of an SSD?
At Seagate, they invented the “Mach.2 multi-actuator” technology a while ago when it was first used in the Exos 2X14 product line. In short, the point is that the writing and reading heads are divided into several independent units, therefore they work in parallel and therefore much faster.
A new line of discs Ex 2X18 uses improved Mach.2 technology in capacities of 16 and 18 terabytes at 7200rpm. They can run on classic SATA or even SAS and are designed for 24/7 operation. What is interesting, though, is the speed these drives are capable of. The SATA version pushes off the plates up to 545MB/s and SAS up to 554MB/s. These are the values of classic SATA SSD disks. However, the price will probably be a bit higher, for comparison, the Exos X18 (that is, a normal disk) with a capacity of 18 TB costs about 8,500 CZK. Double speed, double price?
