Seagate's HDD multi actuator performance breakthrough

[HEXUS]

Tech could double the data performance of its near-future generation hard drives.

Read more.

[shaithis]

Always wondered why they didn't work like this, seemed a logical way of upping transfer speeds when you have multiple heads and platters...

[azrael-]

So you're going to lose data twice as fast now...?

[afiretruck]

Always wondered why they didn't work like this, seemed a logical way of upping transfer speeds when you have multiple heads and platters...

I think this is more for increasing IOPS with multiple concurrent jobs than increasing overall transfer speeds.

Maybe it'll better mitigate the massive reduction in transfer speeds when introducing random IOPS.

[LSG501]

Hmmm... not sure I like this idea, two drives for 'backup' etc is fine because you have redundancy but putting 2 things inside one case can double the things that can fail which ultimately increases the chances of an item failing. This is basically reads as if it's going to be striped raid inside one box so if one fails you lose the whole lot...

I'm also not sure that at this is going to be fast enough to counter a pcie ssd let alone a ram drive if someone really wants fast IOPS

[Wrinkly]

SSD pricing is ridiculous. Good time to introduce this tech to the HDD.

[Slogbelly]

As long as it doesn't push HDD pricing up too much, this might make a nice boost to that market.

[xslavic]

HDD is safer than SSD
I have 2tb hitachi 7200rpm + 2 nvme at 250gb each

[Iota]

HDD is safer than SSD

Got any evidence to back up that claim?

Honestly, I'm still running my Raid 0 array of 4 SSDs from the PC I built 6-7 years ago. I have never been able to say the same about any HDD I've ever used. Anecdotal at best, but I'd love to see something proving your claim.

[adidan]

HDD is safer than SSD
I have 2tb hitachi 7200rpm + 2 nvme at 250gb each

All the SSDs i've owned over the years are still going strong. Nearly all of my HDDs have failed irrespective of brand.

One man's story.

Edit: Oddly enough my portable HDDs are still working but they're used far far less.

[ByteMyAscii]

Due to being very dependant on the physical location of the data, I suspect we won't see much benefit except under carefully manipulated conditions.
Operations performed entirely or mostly by one set of heads will see little or even no improvement.

Though there is the potential for a specialised tool to split regularly read/written files between the two halves.

[afiretruck]

All the SSDs i've owned over the years are still going strong. Nearly all of my HDDs have failed irrespective of brand.

I've had the complete opposite experience since my first SSD purchase in 2011. I've had 5 SSDs fail on me since then, albeit 3 were OCZ Vertexes. The less said about those, the better. 2 of them, however, were Samsung Pros.

I've owned maybe 15-20 HDDs since I got into computers in 2007 and none of them have died on me.

SSDs feel like they should be more reliable, due to the lack of moving parts I guess, but there's so many other things that could go wrong with them that we might not yet understand (power-loss protection, anyone?). At least the bulk of HDD issues had been smoothed out long ago.

I think the bottom line is that nothing is totally 100% reliable, and to have a decent 1-2-3 backup solution in pace if your data is important to you. Have RAID if your time is precious, even for SSDs. Especially if you use write-back cache SSDs.

[Xlucine]

Due to being very dependant on the physical location of the data, I suspect we won't see much benefit except under carefully manipulated conditions.
Operations performed entirely or mostly by one set of heads will see little or even no improvement.

Though there is the potential for a specialised tool to split regularly read/written files between the two halves.

People have been using RAID to add performance to hard drives for years, this is just RAID in a single package

[DanceswithUnix]

People have been using RAID to add performance to hard drives for years, this is just RAID in a single package

It is interesting, as long as you have enough queue depth on the drive it should be like doubling the number of spindles in terms of IOPS. Ten years ago I might have been mildly impressed, but these days spinning rust is low cost storage for consumers or archival storage for the enterprise which has moved to all flash arrays. I mean, who wants a doubling in IOPS when going flash gets you about three magnitudes?

[Glyce]

2 drives, 1 cable, where have I seen this...?

[peterb]

2 drives, 1 cable, where have I seen this...?

Go, on - gives us a clue...