Western Digital is releasing Dual-Actuator HDD with performance close to SSDs

[MC_MAN]

Summary

Western Digital announced the Ultrastar DC HS760 20TB that has two actuators that work in parallel increasing the performance of the drive. They also say it uses les power than two separate drives despite the second actuator.

 

Quotes

Quote

Two independent actuators in the drive work in parallel, offering up twice the sequential throughput (up to 582 MB/s), which is on par with a SATA SSD in throughput, and 1.7X higher random performance than a single-actuator HDD (still not comparable to an SSD)

 

My thoughts

Seems like this could have been something that should be around all the time. I'm sure there were other HDD with 2 actuators but nothing I can think of recently. Maybe will finally be a cheaper solution to fast storage once the price drops. 

 

Sources

WD Launches Dual-Actuator 20TB HDDs With SATA SSD-Like Throughput | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)
Ultrastar DC HS760 Performance Data Center HDD | Western Digital

[Crunchy Dragon]

I remember when WD made 10 and 15,000 RPM hard drives.

 

Be interesting to see a combo of the two.

[Coaxialgamer]

The performance advantage of something like a SATA SSD over a hard drive was never about sequential speed though. A good 7.2k RPM drive can do 250MB/s, which is fine for basically anything most people would need a drive to do (and certainly faster than any internet connection if you were downloading something).

 

The problem was and always will be random performance, a problem inherent to the technology of spinning media. Adding a second actuator to improve performance is like putting a band-aid on a small scrape while ignoring the gaping, bleeding wound a few inches below. And the way I see it, that's even more true now that SSDs have become so cheap per gig.

 

The only strength HDDs have left is cost and (for now) density. Making hard drives faster is a cool engineering achievement, but it's sort of like trying to engineer (breed?) a faster horse in an era where cars are available.

 

Edit: yes, I have been made aware that some applications would favor a faster hard drive. I still remain unconvinced that this a viable direction for the technology as a whole, but that's just my layman assessment. In any case, no need to tell me about them.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

The performance advantage of something like a SATA SSD over a hard drive was never about sequential speed though. A good 7.2k RPM drive can do 250MB/s, which is fine for basically anything most people would need a drive to do (and certainly faster than any internet connection if you were downloading something).

It's a datacenter HDD and I'd very much like double the throughput and almost twice the IOPs on my backup storage clusters.

 

And no I'm not going to buy 4PB of SSDs for backup storage.

[OhioYJ]

So I'm kind of curious as to why this only came out under the Ultrastar line, and none under the Gold? Why just a 20 TB? Is this just a initial launch? Was just to make sure they had something larger than Seagate out?  I notice neither (WD or Seagate) really promote or sell these drives openly?  Whereas you can easily obtain their regular enterprise drives. Are they concerned about something still?

[porina]

I'd view this as a tech I'd like to have but don't want to pay for. I only use HDs for video storage and other backups. For infrequent use it isn't bad but drives getting bigger without interface speeds doing likewise means it takes forever to do large writes or whole disk operations e.g. data integrity checks. This improvement would at least put it on par with SATA SSDs. My networking currently isn't up to it, but if I upgraded to 10G then it could halve transfer times.

[Coaxialgamer]

37 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's a datacenter HDD and I'd very much like double the throughput and almost twice the IOPs on my backup storage clusters.

 

And no I'm not going to buy 4PB of SSDs for backup storage.

Sure, I get that. But admittedly if you're going HDD-only you probably want density and low cost, not necessarily speed, and I'd bet most backup solutions fall in that ballpark.

And if you do there are probably other options to achieve it, be that striping data across multiple drives, tiered storage with SSD caching or even just plain SSD storage.

 

This is an intermediary solution between pure SSD and existing mechanical drives, but frankly it still leans far too much on the mechanical side of performance to fill a niche, imo

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

So I'm kind of curious as to why this only came out under the Ultrastar line, and none under the Gold? Why just a 20 TB? Is this just a initial launch? Was just to make sure they had something larger than Seagate out?  I notice neither (WD or Seagate) really promote or sell these drives openly?  Whereas you can easily obtain their regular enterprise drives. Are they concerned about something still?

They probably haven't been validated through HPE, Dell/EMC, Netapp etc. Once they are and they get product numbers and can be ordered with servers and storage systems then they'll probably get a lot higher production rates.

 

Same thing happened with regular HDDs that make the news about being the next largest, it's actually quite a long time before I can order it with an HPE server.

[leadeater]

26 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Sure, I get that. But admittedly if you're going HDD-only you probably want density and low cost, not necessarily speed, and I'd bet most backup solutions fall in that ballpark.

Backup storage not needing good performance is a misnomer, it's actually way more important than typically appears and that performance profile is a lot different to normal workloads. It also depends on how and what backup software you are using and also the storage solution being used.

 

Getting good throughput is required to meet both backup maintenance windows and restore time objectives, when you have a lot of data getting good throughput matters.

 

Also for most places the largest workload on the production systems is the backups. This is why I personally prefer technologies like NetApp SnapVault as the data handling and moving capabilities is far superior to traditional streaming backup and can still be orchestrated with backup software as well as copying data out to cloud and tape as required etc.

 

Long time ago we used 4 NetApp 3220 controllers (each datacenter) with 2 full racks of double density HDD shelves and SMB data shares presented to our backup software, we then moved to sharing 6 8200 controllers (each datacenter) with production workloads but using separate disk shelves/aggregates for the backup data and transitioned to using SnapVault.

 

Now we use 15 HPE Apollo servers with a total of 360 HDDs running Ceph and have gone back to traditional streaming backups off the primary storage. Yes all the data runs through dedicated backup servers with NVMe SSDs doing data deduplication but we still need multiple GB/s performance and decent IOPs. We are performance limited by the HDDs so simply introducing twice as fast HDDs would be a massive benefit, we do not need more capacity and we do not want more servers with more HDDs of lower capacity just to increase throughput. Dual actuator HDDs are the more efficient and more cost effective solution.

 

As I said I'm not going to buy 4PB of SSD for backups, that cost difference is way way too wide. If there wasn't an active interest in such a thing Seagate and WD would never have bothered making them, if I want them many others want them.

[Quackers101]

when you get the planned 50TB, but instead of spinning discs, light mems and zap those discs into space.

nvm, alien etched glass. Just waiting for new and very hard drives with awesome tech, whatever the goal is next.

 

microsoft research - Project Silica, Storing Data in Glass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzHsibqpIs

 

[leadeater]

Some key important things to note for this WD HDD:

• PMR/CMR
• Presents to the host system as two 10TB LUNs (disk devices) so not suitable for traditional RAID and must use software that can handle this properly i.e. Hadoop/Ceph etc
• Only comes in single port SAS, not SATA

 

I would recommend Seagate over this WD option because:

• PMR/CMR
• Comes in SAS and SATA
• All SATA SKUs present as single LUN
• All SAS SKUs present as two LUNs (software support required like the WD)

 

Seagate came to market with dual actuator way before WD and far as I see it have much better options.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Coaxialgamer said:

The performance advantage of something like a SATA SSD over a hard drive was never about sequential speed though. A good 7.2k RPM drive can do 250MB/s, which is fine for basically anything most people would need a drive to do

Not really. A SATA SSD was just a way to put a SSD into a system without M.2 connectors, SATA-mode M.2 SSD's were a thing as well.  The entire reason M.2 is a thing is because SATA SSD's are mostly empty space. Consider that 2TB of space can be had on a microSD card, and that is even smaller than the M2 connector or SATA connector. 

 

In an ideal situation, the M2 slots would be on the back side of the motherboard in a chasis that has a cutout for it to consume no space. Alternatively on their own x16 slot.

 

But mechanical drives, physically consume the space of no less than 16 full size M2 cards and are 8-16x faster than the fastest SATA drives.  There is physically no way to make mechanical drives competitive with SSD's except for capacity. There is nothing you can do to a mechanical drive to get 8GB/s out of it except to make it mechanically a 16-drive RAID. 

 

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, Kisai said:

A SATA SSD was just a way to put a SSD into a system without M.2 connectors, SATA-mode M.2 SSD's were a thing as well.  The entire reason M.2 is a thing is because SATA SSD's are mostly empty space

Only really for consumer SSDs. The really large capacity SATA SSDs fill all that space and can also be 15mm thick rather than 9mm most laptops take.

 

M.2 is great for both consumer and Enterprise/Datacenter though, although for Ent/DC only for boot devices. USB and SD Card boot media never seems like a good solution and failed too often, luckily when you did use it the boot device simply didn't matter if it did fail except for the inconvenience of it i.e. ESXi. VMware no longer supports USB and SD Card booting though.

 

EDSFF is starting to replace 2.5" formfactor though, but that is also an interface change too. Edit: For Ent/DC.

Edited February 1, 2023 by leadeater

[Beerzerker]

2 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I remember when WD made 10 and 15,000 RPM hard drives.

 

Be interesting to see a combo of the two.

I still have a few of those (Velociraptor drives) in working order and will be checking these drives out later.

SSD's are fine but I still prefer a HDD for simple reliability and the ability to rescue data from a dying HDD drive before it's 100% gone in most cases.
Unlike an SSD which can/will die without warning and "That's all folks", most of the time an HDD will give some indication it's about to go, giving you time to back up it's data beforehand so you don't lose it.

[ewitte]

2 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

The performance advantage of something like a SATA SSD over a hard drive was never about sequential speed though. A good 7.2k RPM drive can do 250MB/s, which is fine for basically anything most people would need a drive to do (and certainly faster than any internet connection if you were downloading something).

 

The problem was and always will be random performance, a problem inherent to the technology of spinning media. Adding a second actuator to improve performance is like putting a band-aid on a small scrape while ignoring the gaping, bleeding wound a few inches below. And the way I see it, that's even more true now that SSDs have become so cheap per gig.

 

 

Random even on a good HDD is something like 2MB/s.

[wanderingfool2]

5 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

"That's all folks", most of the time an HDD will give some indication it's about to go

I can't agree with this more.  While it's nice to have the concept of backups and keeping backups up to date...it's also really nice being able to go "Oh my drive seems to be struggling, I better go get a replacement drive and just clone it quickly".  (Then use the other drive until it fails for misc projects or just cold storaging some data that's already backed up but just as a precaution having a spare).

 

Countless times having SSD's fail without any warning signs (and losing a day of data or just in general having to make sure the backups are running 100%)  For some things HDD's just life easier.  I don't really care too much about 100 - 200 MB/s vs 1 GB/s anyways for most day to day use.  The benefit from SSD's really was the random reads/writes.  If you had 2 ssds, same random iops but one was 150 MB/s and the other was 1 GB/s I bet for most purposes people would not notice a difference (except in games)

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I can't agree with this more.  While it's nice to have the concept of backups and keeping backups up to date...it's also really nice being able to go "Oh my drive seems to be struggling, I better go get a replacement drive and just clone it quickly".  (Then use the other drive until it fails for misc projects or just cold storaging some data that's already backed up but just as a precaution having a spare).

 

Countless times having SSD's fail without any warning signs (and losing a day of data or just in general having to make sure the backups are running 100%)  For some things HDD's just life easier.  I don't really care too much about 100 - 200 MB/s vs 1 GB/s anyways for most day to day use.  The benefit from SSD's really was the random reads/writes.  If you had 2 ssds, same random iops but one was 150 MB/s and the other was 1 GB/s I bet for most purposes people would not notice a difference (except in games)

I don't think using HDD over SSD because "it usually doesn't fail outright" is a very good idea. Yes it's true that SSDs are more likely to fail "out of the blue" than HDDs, but the frequency of which they fail is so incredibly low compared to HDDs that it doesn't really matter.

 

If you want some hard numbers, a Western Digital HDD is around 650% more likely to break within the first year compared to a Samsung SSD. If we are talking consumer drives. At least according to the latest numbers I could find (which was sadly 2017, but I doubt much has changed).

 

It's not enough to just look at "what happens if a drive fails" to do risk assessment. You also have to factor in how likely it is for a particular drive to fail, and in that regard SSDs are far and beyond more reliable.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I don't think using HDD over SSD because "it usually doesn't fail outright" is a very good idea. Yes it's true that SSDs are more likely to fail "out of the blue" than HDDs, but the frequency of which they fail is so incredibly low compared to HDDs that it doesn't really matter.

I think it's less out of the blue and more that we have less ways to tell there is something wrong with our own senses. HDDs can start sounding odd when failing, in many different ways and we can perceive that and go "huh that's not right". We can't do that with an SSD.

 

Who here is running active SMART monitoring on their SSDs with alerts on indicated write wear, reallocations and CRC errors?

 

The servers and storage arrays at work all do this and give an estimated % of healthiness, I don't get that from my gaming motherboard and SATA SSD I'm using. I can open a SMART reader and try and figure it out but that's no good if it's already failed.

[porina]

23 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The servers and storage arrays at work all do this and give an estimated % of healthiness, I don't get that from my gaming motherboard and SATA SSD I'm using. I can open a SMART reader and try and figure it out but that's no good if it's already failed.

I think most enthusiast mobos do warn if SMART values are in the danger zone, but wont tell you that things are ok but getting worse. It's a bit yes/no.

[Sauron]

I wonder if there are any drawbacks for longevity, after all it's a more complex mechanical system with delicate moving parts.

[leadeater]

35 minutes ago, porina said:

I think most enthusiast mobos do warn if SMART values are in the danger zone, but wont tell you that things are ok but getting worse. It's a bit yes/no.

They will only when you go and view them. Without active software in Windows configured to monitor the relevant SMART values there will be no warning presented to you.

 

Similarly disk errors and warnings are logged in Event Viewer but unless you go check or configure alerting if present you won't see them.

 

Errors, warnings and other events do no good if not presented to the user. That's where HDDs do well because they can make audible signs of failure.

[porina]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

They will only when you go and view them.

Mobos can warn you on boot. Photo below from someone I know who recently encountered it. I'll give it wont help if the warning state is eneterd while you're already booted as you wont see it until next boot. I think but don't run myself, the SSD software that comes from each manufacturer can also give SMART warnings without the user having to go look for it.

 

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

Mobos can warn you on boot. Photo below from someone I know who recently encountered it.

Ah right, I forgot about boot. I never restart or turn off my computer lol.

 

4 minutes ago, porina said:

I think but don't run myself, the SSD software that comes from each manufacturer can also give SMART warnings without the user having to go look for it.

I keep Samsung Magician running for this reason. I don't want my SSD to start getting errors without me knowing.

 

 

8.1 years power on hours 

[BetteBalterZen]

11 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

The only strength HDDs have left is cost and (for now) density. Making hard drives faster is a cool engineering achievement, but it's sort of like trying to engineer (breed?) a faster horse in an era where cars are available.

100%

[Doobeedoo]

Seagate already released these. Mainly this is for increasing IOPS/TB more than raw throughput. So far cry from SSD in that sense. Also these are all meant for datacenters.