From Tom's Hardware: We already know that HDDs suddenly have a new lease on life with new recording technologies, but now your next hard drive may be twice as fast as any drive on the market. Seagate announced that it plans to double the performance of its future HDDs with its multi-actuator technology.
HDD density has continued to rise, but the mild performance improvements with each new generation are mostly borne of density increases instead of new whiz-bang tech. That's why SSDs have taken over the performance role and HDDs have retreated into the high-capacity space. We're on the cusp of even more explosive capacity increases as WD and Seagate both roll out their new recording technologies. Both companies predict their future HDDs will increase beyond 40TB, which means stagnant performance will become one of the biggest challenges.
Increased capacities combined with similar gen-on-gen performance results in a lower IOPS per TB rating, which isn't ideal for data centers. For instance, most 3.5" enterprise HDDs reach ~250MB/s of sequential throughput, so a 40TB HDD would take nearly two days to fill under ideal conditions. That also has implications for application performance, RAID rebuilds, and other common tasks.
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