What do you think of dual actuator hard drives? I never knew these even existed…
Here’s a quick summary of the vid for those who want a TL;DW:
- Dual actuator drives are a single drive with two actuator arms inside
- These arms have their own platters, each with access to half of the drive’s capacity
- The SAS version shows up as two separate drives: one for each actuator
- The SATA version shows up as a single drive, however can be partitioned at a specific LBA near the middle to use both actuators independently
- Linux kernel updated to support these drives better when queuing commands
- Capable of saturating a 5gbit SATA link
Personally, my concern is RAID setups, particularly in a SAS config. Will filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS know that two storage devices are the same physical drive… aside from that, and concern about more mechanical parts, this looks exciting especially for sequential speed throughput!
EDIT: fix typos
ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven’t already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don’t care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I’d rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust’s short lifespan as-is.
The amazing thing about those are that they are halfing the rebuild time. With large drives you get rebuild time of over 24 hours which is actually frightening.
Setup is a one time thing and yes you need to be carefull about it but i bet software support will come as soon as those get more mainstream.
It’s a Seagate, i would never buy it. Host (now wd) for life.
Timd to update your criteria, friend. Seagate hasn’t been top of the failure stack for like 8 years now. The 3TB scandal era is long since passed. Now it’s WD who has been shitting on quality control, sending out faulty SSD’s that wipe user data, bait-and-switching HDD customers with a cheaper, much worse performing technology (SMR) WITHOUT TELLING THEM, them basically blowing corporate raspberries at everyone when people complain.
While i agree they were the best, HGST also hasn’t even existed as a non-WD product for years…
Yep. Seagate have earned their reputation. Pass.
Care to elaborate?
They’ve had some of the highest failure rates among drive manufacturers.
Never ever going to buy Seagate again after the crap they’ve pulled on their Exos drives.
They simply decided to completely trash SMART and spin down commands. The drives simply won’t give you useful SMART data nor they won’t ever actually spin down, you can’t force it, the drive will report is as if it was spun down but in reality its still spinning.
