Seagate's Multi Actuator Technology will boost HDD read/write speeds

Everything in the world of technology depends on speed. With increasingly demanding applications, hardware manufacturers are pushing the boundaries to make CPUs process data faster, RAM store more data and supply in the shortest time possible, and lightning fast storage. However, while we are utilising wafer-thin silicon chips for processing data, we are still relying a lot on magnetic disks to store data. Therefore, hard disks are still necessary for the current times and manufacturers are looking to make it faster than when it came out several decades ago.

Seagate has been lately attempting to increase data transmission speeds on conventional hard drives and their latest attempt involves two actuators reading/writing data simultaneously. The company says that the use of two separate actuators will aid for larger storage solutions with faster data read/write speeds. The Multi-Actuator Technology will be primarily beneficial for large businesses relying on data servers to run operations.

Conventional magnetic hard drives use a single actuator to read data across the number of magnetic disks present in the stack. The tip of each arm in the actuator consists of a magnetic head to read data from the magnetic disk. Due to technical constraints, all the arms have to move simultaneously to read data, which indirectly results in longer data read/write speeds as other magnetic heads are laid to rest while one is performing the operation. For the layman, think of the hard drive as a gramophone that reads data of multiple magnetic record disks in a stack — the arm on a gramophone moves physically to read a particular sector on a disk. With Multi-Actuator Technology, all the arms will be grouped separately in two different actuator arms, thus speeding up the processes a tad more.

Seagate hasn’t outlined a planned rollout for hard drives utilising the new technology but we expect it to see it soon in action in the near future.