Seagate claims that its new Multi Actuator technology, set to reach the future hard disk drives, can double the data performance.

An actuator is the component that moves a hard drive's heads over the media surface, to read and write data. Each recording head sits at the end of a moving actuator arm. Hard drives today are equipped with a single actuator, which moves all the read-write heads together in synchronous motion.

Currrently under development, the Multi Actuator technology will equip hard drives with dual actuators (two actuators). With two actuators operating on a single pivot point, each actuator will control half of the drive's arms. Half the drive's recording heads will operate together as a unit, while the other half will operate independently as a separate unit. This enables a hard drive to double its performance while maintaining the same capacity as that of a single actuator drive.

Seagate's new Multi Actuation technology is a way to put the performance of parallelism within a single hard drive unit. The host computer can treat a single Dual Actuator drive as if it were two separate drives. This means the host computer can ask a single high-capacity drive to retrieve two different data requests simultaneously - delivering data up to twice as fast compared with a single-actuator drive.

Seagate has also developed a new Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology that will provide for the Datasphere's highest areal density needs. The new HAMR-enabled Exos hard drives - which will be in pilot volumes next year and full volume in late 2019 - and Multi Actuator technologies provide promising capacity and performance for he future.