Amid the ongoing Chia boom, Seagate just announced an HDD that's as fast as SATA SSDs

Seagate recently announced its new Mach.2 HDD, a hard disk drive so fast that it can keep up with conventional SATA SSDs in sequential throughput. The 14TB HDD is aimed squarely at the enterprise market, with the promise of high storage capacity, fast transfers and reliability. 

The Mach.2 has a helium-filled chassis and achieves its high throughput thanks to twin actuator arms that act independently. The Mach.2 comes at a very interesting point of time, with Chia, a storage-based cryptocurrency gaining traction. Chia plotting requires both high performance and high durability storage, roles that the Mach.2 would fill equally well. As a hard drive, we'd expect it to last considerably longer in Chia workloads than SSDs. 

The Seagate Mach.2 does have its share of caveats, however. For starters, it doesn't connect via SATA. Instead, it uses 12 GB/s SAS. You'd need a SAS addon card to get it working on a conventional motherboard. Moreover, the Mach.2's enterprise focus means that we'll not likely see it in commercial markets. We can't rule out the possibility, though, of consumer-oriented HDDs coming out in the future, leveraging Mach.2 tech. As it stands, the Mach.2 is an interesting curiosity - an HDD based on decades-old mechanical tech, that's somehow manage to catch up with solid state storage in certain respects. 

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