Western digital to demo Dual-Actuator HDD's

rawrdaysgoby · March 15, 2019

why are you guys competing over ssd and hdd they all still currently have their own place in the world and WD doesn''t care cuase they own Sandisk as well

rawrdaysgoby · March 15, 2019

7 hours ago, Hellion said:

It all depends on the price.

SSD's have gone up again since the new year (at least up north) so having a cheaper solution as a secondary drive is still a viable option depending on the workload.

yea it has gone back up to to supply normalizing no longer being oversupplied

RejZoR · March 15, 2019

18 hours ago, crystal6tak said:

I'd be interested if it came in 8tb. Dump my entire steam library, movies, other *cough movies, and just a bunch of other stuff without worrying about running out of space.

Would using a separate 128gb ssd as cache have similar performance boost as a built in one?

Well, I for a fact know it would. It's all about IOPS and latency, something HDD's suck at. And any SSD has high IOPS number and low latency for reads. Writes are almost always sequential anyway (the way things are batched before writing in the write buffer) so direct writes to HDD aren't even the issue, it's the fast reads we need the most which are often scattered all over the platters and contribute to slow reading speeds when read head is jumping back and forth gathering the bits of data. The fact it's not built into HDD really makes no difference because of the IOPS and latency benefits you're instantly getting from the included SSD for cache, bandwidth constraints of SATA3 really makes very little difference. And best part of it, it's an easy upgrade so it's even more baffling why more people aren't doing it. You literally just slam the SSD into the computer, install PrimoCache, pair the SSD to the existing HDD and you're done. No need to reinstall OS or shuffle data around by hand. The rest is done fully automatically by the PrimoCache caching algorithms. It's really a 10 minute process that gives massive performance boost for like 60-70 bucks in total cost for any existing system.

I've checked for the lolz and both, WD and Seagate have 8TB HDD's. When paired with SSD cache you could even get away with regular 5400 RPM versions. But lets say we want to really go hardcore with 7200 RPM one. Seagate Barracuda Pro 8TB 7200 RPM goes for around 260€. PrimoCache is 30€ lifetime license, Samsung SM951 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD is 85€. Total of 375€ for mind blowing capacity of 8TB at even more mindblowing speeds for everything in those 8TB as they get cached to blazing fast 256GB NVMe SSD. You can just dream of 8TB SSD for under 400€. There are some limitations like HDD noise which will still happen and slower first time launches, but everything that you use regularly, it'll be boosted to insane speeds. And by "regularly" it even applies to playing a game. If you just start a game once and play it from start to finish in one go it'll load things faster because many resources are shared and will get cached as you'll play the game, resulting in instant better performance even after just one level without the need to fire up the game several times. And for games you'll play daily, like multiplayer games, it'll feel like you're using SSD only. Even HDD noise will basically go away over time for such stuff as it'll just read it from SSD cache without ever touching HDD again. It's really incredible thing that I can guarantee you'll not regret it.