Seagate has created a HDD with transfer speeds to rival SATA-based solid state drives

[PwnyTheTiger]

Seagate has unveiled the fastest hard drive known to man, a 14TB behemoth of spinning platters that can rival some SSDs in the raw transfer speed race, the new Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 is only getting close to the sustained transfer speeds of SATA based SSDs, and mainstream ones at that. Seagate's dual-actuator tech will boast speeds up to a 524MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate on a SAS 12Gbps interface rather than the standard SATA 6Gbps interface, which is obviously geared more for the Datacentre crowd. Seagate managed to squeeze out this level of performance from a physical set of spinning platters with their Mach.2 technology, which describes a drive with twin actuator arms capable of operating independently.

 

 

Quotes

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While this is not exactly going to change the world of gaming PCs, it's still fascinating to see there is still a place for genuine innovation in one of the oldest technologies in computing. 

 

My thoughts

 Seeing this older tech still growing is good to see and opens up possibilities for companies like LMG to continue to expand their long term data storage even more so.

 

Sources

 https://www.pcgamer.com/fastest-hard-drive-in-the-world/

[Fasauceome]

Coming soon to a motherboard near you:

 

A cute little M.2 NVMe hard drive

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, Fasauceome said:

A cute little M.2 NVMe hard drive

I'd buy the heck out of those

[LTT_fanboy]

WOW these are already listed on amazon for like 300$

 

[Chris Pratt]

19 minutes ago, PwnyTheTiger said:

Seagate has unveiled the fastest hard drive known to man, a 14TB behemoth of spinning platters that can rival some SSDs in the raw transfer speed race, the new Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 is only getting close to the sustained transfer speeds of SATA based SSDs, and mainstream ones at that. Seagate's dual-actuator tech will boast speeds up to a 524MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate on a SAS 12Gbps interface rather than the standard SATA 6Gbps interface, which is obviously geared more for the Datacentre crowd. Seagate managed to squeeze out this level of performance from a physical set of spinning platters with their Mach.2 technology, which describes a drive with twin actuator arms capable of operating independently.

 

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

 Seeing this older tech still growing is good to see and opens up possibilities for companies like LMG to continue to expand their long term data storage even more so.

 

Sources

 https://www.pcgamer.com/fastest-hard-drive-in-the-world/

Oh. Yay. More moveable parts to fail.

 

Seriously, though, this is a win for the data center crowd, as balancing raw storage capacity with speed has always been an issue, but by that same token, I'd be a bit wary of increased failure rates, which is also a big problem. You might might just cut off your arm to save your leg.

[StDragon]

7 minutes ago, LTT_fanboy said:

WOW these are already listed on amazon for like 300$

 

Not anymore they're not. 8TB and above not listed. Must be sold out.

[SupaKomputa]

17 minutes ago, PwnyTheTiger said:

twin actuator arms capable of operating independently

How don't they think of this before? Love to see hdd is competitive.

 

4 minutes ago, LTT_fanboy said:

WOW these are already listed on amazon for like 300$

 

$300 for 14TB is not bad at all.

 

[TetraSky]

End of the day, it's still a spinning rust.

Even if the continuous read/write speeds are high, the random read/write will be low and never come close to what an SSD can do.

 

Still nice to have and might be worth it depending on your use case.

[da na]

28 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Coming soon to a motherboard near you:

 

A cute little M.2 NVMe hard drive

They made that in ‘00…

Although it would be impractical, it would be cool to see a refresh of tiny HDDs…

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, LTT_fanboy said:

WOW these are already listed on amazon for like 300$

 

They are not on amazon, just the regular Exos drives are. These aren't even fully released yet.

[WolframaticAlpha]

15 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

I'd buy the heck out of those

Why would you? Unless it's direct PCie gen4, then there is no point.

 

 

 

SARCASM

[Radium_Angel]

37 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

then there is no point.

Because it's cool.

There doesn't have to be a reason for everything.

Sometimes, "Because I want it" is reason enough.

 

34 minutes ago, comander said:

spinning rust

HD platters don't rust. I made a windchime out of some dead drives 20 years ago, they are still shiny and rust free, despite being outside 24/7.

[Kilrah]

Cool to see it actually comes out, they've been talking about this for many years. Was supposed to be able to write with one head set while reading with the other as well, much improving access times...

 

  

Just now, comander said:

Spinning rust is an industry term. It's people joking about how slow hard drives are by modern standards. 

Also the fact that hard drives are magnetic storage, and rust=iron=magnetic...

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, comander said:

Spinning rust is an industry term. It's people joking about how slow hard drives are by modern standards. 

 

I've seen it used at at least 3 different fortune 500 companies that I've worked at and a fair bit on places like STH. 

Yep but it makes abut as much sense as calling SSD persistent diamonds. Because that exactly how much the multiple petabytes of disk storage for backups would cost if I were to put them on SSD.

 

HDDs aren't dying nor are they useless and this has probably just doubled or more their useful life span.

 

Sure you all can keep your nice PCIe 4 NVMe SSDs with terrible write endurance, I'll be just as happy with these dual actuator drives in object storage servers totaling hundreds of drives that have more IOPs and throughput than your PCIe 4 NVMe drive. But ok fine that's going to cost a lot more than a single NVMe but you show me a single NVMe with 4PB+ capacity 

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Cool to see it actually comes out, they've been talking about this for many years. Was supposed to be able to write with one head set while reading with the other as well, much improving access times...

Just note this is only possible on SAS interface/protocol. SATA only supports a single data channel and single command at a time where SAS supports dual data channel and multiple commands at a time.

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Yep but it makes abut as much sense as calling SSD persistent diamonds. Because that exactly how much the multiple petabytes of disk storage for backups would cost if I were to put them on SSD.

 

HDDs aren't dying nor are they useless and this has probably just doubled or more their useful life span.

 

Sure you all can keep your nice PCIe 4 NVMe SSDs with terrible write endurance, I'll be just as happy with these dual actuator drives in object storage servers totaling hundreds of drives that have more IOPs and throughput than your PCIe 4 NVMe drive. But ok fine that's going to cost a lot more than a single NVMe but you show me a single NVMe with 4PB+ capacity 

Harddrives are great for somethings and horrible for others. Personally I can't use anything but ssds in my desktop because I have no reason to. I don't really ever go over the 4tb worth of ssd space I have in my pc. Sure it could have been cheaper to get a Harddrive but it also would be much slower and defeat the purpose of having a nice and fast pc. 

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Harddrives are great for somethings and horrible for others. Personally I can't use anything but ssds in my desktop because I have no reason to. I don't really ever go over the 4tb worth of ssd space I have in my pc. Sure it could have been cheaper to get a Harddrive but it also would be much slower and defeat the purpose of having a nice and fast pc. 

Yep, it's not like these HDDs are targeted for primary storage and likely will never be seen in the consumer market either. I would be extremely surprised to see this make it even to low end NAS disks as well.

 

Exos isn't exactly the cheapest HDD's on the market already and these are going to be worse than that.

 

Another thing to be careful of and this requires careful software optimization, the disks present themselves as two logical 7TB storage devices, as in far as the host system sees it they are two HDDs. Unless you can keep parity or data copies from living on the same physical disk you'll have a very bad time when a disk fails as you'll be losing "two disks" not "one".

 

Per logical drive these will be no faster than current HDDs and is only possible using SAS interface, as implemented currently it is impossible to do this using SATA.

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

How don't they think of this before? Love to see hdd is competitive.

 

 

They did.

2019:

https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/multi-actuator-technology-a-new-performance-breakthrough/

 

It's not like it was impossible before, but there was no reason to do this before now, because NVMe is lapping mechanical drives.

 

However, why stop at two. Just put separate arms on each platter. Heck, put them on opposing sides of the same platter.

 

There's obviously problems doing this. You need far larger caches, you need to be able to synchronize writes so that two heads don't write to the same space, so it's theoretically slower to write.

[RejZoR]

2TB SSD + 14TB MACH.2 hybrid combo? Yes please! You couldn't ever get an SSD of such size for same or even close money.

[Albal_156]

Chia miners are gonna love this.

 

[porina]

14 hours ago, Chris Pratt said:

I'd be a bit wary of increased failure rates, which is also a big problem.

Assuming the storage is somewhat performance biased and not just pure capacity, then before this drive existed you'd likely have to have two separate drives for comparable performance. So all else being equal, it is probably still a net improvement.

 

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

Just note this is only possible on SAS interface/protocol. SATA only supports a single data channel and single command at a time where SAS supports dual data channel and multiple commands at a time.

Doesn't SATA have scatter gather? I know it will be far less optimal and relies on software making use of it, but that could lead to a similar effect if the drives were presented as a single logical unit. I'm assuming the different head sets can overlap in what they can access, and are not partitioned.

 

37 minutes ago, Albal_156 said:

Chia miners are gonna love this.

No they wont. Chances are conventional drives will be far better value since performance when farming doesn't matter. Might they have use for plotting? Maybe, but the numbers required for that are far smaller.

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, porina said:

Doesn't SATA have scatter gather? I know it will be far less optimal and relies on software making use of it, but that could lead to a similar effect if the drives were presented as a single logical unit. I'm assuming the different head sets can overlap in what they can access, and are not partitioned.

No idea how effective that would be though. The drive is just split by platters and the actuators are top half bottom half split so they can only read/write to those platters. So basically to get any speed up you would have to write data in such a way it's spread across those two partitions of the disk internally otherwise you're effective limited to a single actuator and read/write head.

 

That's why it's done the way it is now, it's very basic and easy to implement and the only requirement is SAS interface. It's two disks that share a main motor and platter shaft, basically, super basically.

[RejZoR]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

Assuming the storage is somewhat performance biased and not just pure capacity, then before this drive existed you'd likely have to have two separate drives for comparable performance. So all else being equal, it is probably still a net improvement.

 

Doesn't SATA have scatter gather? I know it will be far less optimal and relies on software making use of it, but that could lead to a similar effect if the drives were presented as a single logical unit. I'm assuming the different head sets can overlap in what they can access, and are not partitioned.

 

No they wont. Chances are conventional drives will be far better value since performance when farming doesn't matter. Might they have use for plotting? Maybe, but the numbers required for that are far smaller.

The whole Chia "it's not proof of work" principle is a big fat dumb lie. They say it's not proof of work yet it ALL depends on how much of work you put in it plotting that shit. And you'll be plotting space non stop in massive quantities. And since doing it on HDD's is impossibly slow, miners have this dumb idea of plotting on faster SSD's. Which wears them down in weeks if it's cheap TLC or months if it's higher end MLC. All this mining is a god damn cancer to entire computer industry and ecology and the sooner it dies, the better.

[Chris Pratt]

17 minutes ago, porina said:

Assuming the storage is somewhat performance biased and not just pure capacity, then before this drive existed you'd likely have to have two separate drives for comparable performance. So all else being equal, it is probably still a net improvement.

 

It would depend, I suppose, somewhat on how the drive reacts to partial failure. If one arm breaks, does the other keep working, with the drive now at half speed (or basically normal HDD speed)? Something tells me no.

 

If not, the two separate, slower drives, is still better from a failover perspective: one fails, the other still works.

[RejZoR]

Just now, Chris Pratt said:

It would depend, I suppose, somewhat on how the drive reacts to partial failure. If one arm breaks, does the other keep working, with the drive now at half speed (or basically normal HDD speed)? Something tells me no.

 

If not, the two separate, slower drives, is still better from a failover perspective: one fails, the other still works.

Check Der8auer's video: