Seagate has announced the fastest hard drive known to mankind, a massive 14TB spinning platter that rivals some SSDs in the raw transfer speed race. This new Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 (PDF warning, via Tom's Hardware) is only approaching the sustained transfer rate of SATA-based SSDs.

But the fact that Seagate's dual-actuator technology is mentioned in the same breath as solid state drives highlights just how effective it is. Maybe consoles moved to SSDs a generation too early." haha, silly consoles .......

As the 14TB capacity suggests, this new hard drive is a data center product, not something you can go to a microcenter to get on a whim. However, it remains the fastest hard drive in the world.

It also relies on a SAS 12Gbps interface rather than the standard SATA 6Gbps found on most motherboards, so it won't connect to most gaming PCs. However, Seagate's promised maximum sustained transfer rate of 524 MB/s is quite close to the 550 MB/s speed of SATA SSDs that can be connected to gaming boards. [But while this is only the maximum transfer rate and is ideal for general storage requirements, it is the random read/write performance of modern SSDs (even the slower SATA-based ones) that makes them feel so slick when running an operating system or game from an SSD This is why SSDs feel so slick when running operating systems and games from them. In this respect, hard disk drives cannot compare.

Think of a record player arm (see, we're talking really old technology here). It's just like that. Only different. And faster.

Not that this is going to change the world of gaming PCs, but it's still fascinating to see that one of the oldest technologies in computing still has a place for real innovation.