https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/04/ ... ion_costs/Looks forward to nicely lowered costs as production ramps up, but they're still hyperscaler-only for now
For about three years, disk-making giant Seagate has been talking up tech called “MACH.2” – a conventional disk drive that offers considerable speed improvements. And now the disk giant has found that the tech also cuts its costs, raising the prospect that big, fast, hard disk drives might emerge at keen prices.
MACH.2 gets its speed by using two actuators – the twitchy little devices that move the arms carrying read/write heads to the parts of a disk’s platter that matter. While disks contain multiple platters and heads, they move all their arms at once and can only do one thing at a time with one arm. MACH.2 drives have two actuators, each driving arms and heads that address half of the platters in a disk and can do two things at once. They’re therefore pleasingly rapid.
MACH.2 also offer pleasingly large capacities up to 20TB. That combination of speed and capacity has seen Microsoft buy up plenty of the Seagate’s early production run and put them to work in the Project Olympus servers it deploys inside the Azure cloud
But MACH.2 is not yet a product the rest of us can go out and buy.
