Stefan Mileschin

Western Digital has revealed this week that it will demonstrate its first dual-actuator hard drives at next week's OCP summit. Marking the company's first foray into multi-actuator drives, WD expects their dual-actuator HDDs to offer roughly twice the performance of conventional, single-actuator drives, although they'll be trading off some power efficiency in the process.

While the capacities of enterprise and nearline 7200-RPM hard drives has been increasing consistently, due to the laws of physics the I/O performance of these drives has remained at around 80 IOPS per drive. This means that because capacity has gone up, the drives' IOPS per TB performance ratio is decreasing, something that is especially problematic when it comes to read IOPS. As a result, it is getting harder for datacenter operators to meet their service level agreements and quality-of-service requirements.

To combat this, one of the most straightforward ways to increase drive performance and throughput is to increase the number of individual actuators, allowing drives to essentially service twice as many I/O operations at once. Both Seagate and Western Digital have been developing their multi-actuator HDDs for quite a while. The former demonstrated a working dual-actuator drive last March, whereas the latter will show off its dual-actuator prototype next week.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14066...hdds-next-week