Seagate announced a new and their fastest mechanical hard drive, the Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14. The HDD holds a nice 14TB of storage and promises to hit sequential speeds of 524MB/s, putting it right up there with SATA III @ 6.0Gbps SSD.

Of course, we're talking linear sustained performance, as access times and random IOPS will still be HDD level performance. Basically Seagate doubled up performance due to a clever trick they've applied. Simply put, the hard drive is made up of 2x HDDs of 7 TB capacity each, linked together and sealed in a 3.5″ chassis with helium. In addition, its 7200 RPM and 256 MB of cache memory offer a 4K random read and write speed of 304/384 IOPS, with an average latency of 4.16 ms. In this way, it manages to even surpass the Seagate Exos 15E900 HDD, which has a spin speed of 15,000 RPM and a consumption of 7.2W / 13.5W in idle and under-heavy workloads, respectively.

“Air-filled 3.5-inch hard drives have operated for many years with very similar power to the Exos 2X14. It should also be noted that the Exos 2X14 supports PowerBalance, which is a setting that allows the customer to reduce power below 12W, but this results in a 50% performance reduction for sequential reads and 5-10% for sequential reads. random reads” explained a Seagate spokesperson.

According to Seagate, another advantage of this disk is the great ratio it offers to the price per gigabyte paid, although the company did not announce its price to have a clearer idea of this. Although the Mach.2 Exos 2X14 fails in the random speed compared to SSDs, this is not something that matters too much, since its use is aimed at storing other types of information in data centers, such as information services in the cloud.

Seagate announces its fastest HDD with close to SATA III SSD performance