0
Courtesy Seagate Technologies LLC
In a blog post – republished in Storage Newsletter – by Seagate’s Jason Feist, he says that new multi-actuator technology will allow hard disk drives (HDDs) to meet hyperscale data center requirements, by
. . . solving this concurrent need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive through Multi Actuator technology, which offsets the potential usability issues of super-high-capacity hard drives by doubling hard drive performance.
Two heads are better than one
The multi-actuator technology (MAT) doesn’t increase the number of heads reading and writing. What it does is essentially package two disk drives in to one standard 3.5″ form factor. One set of actuators reads and writes to half the platters, and the other set handles the remaining platters.