Seagate lists the Mach.2 Exos 2X14, its first dual-actuator HDD

[3dcandy]

Didn't I mention "hundreds of spindles"?

I'm used to working with enterprise drives sold by the petabyte, you get performance by distributing across racks full of drives. I'm just surprised that someone would pay for a doubling in performance, when if IOPS matters you get an all flash array or else you just buy twice as many cheap drives.

I guess if you have lots of smallish servers with just a few drives in each they might help.

Exactly my thoughts - you just expressed it better....
Seems servers are all going smaller again - last time I was looking they were ALL toutung Epyc because you can have the same amount of cores and threads in 1p rather than Intel's 2p. It's like ye olde HP servers from ages ago when they made them nearly all 2.5" drives to increase density

[DanceswithUnix]

Seems servers are all going smaller again - last time I was looking they were ALL toutung Epyc because you can have the same amount of cores and threads in 1p rather than Intel's 2p. It's like ye olde HP servers from ages ago when they made them nearly all 2.5" drives to increase density

Good point: again, a pair of 2.5in drives fits in less space than a single 3.5in drive and two spindles is generally faster than one.

Another thought has occurred to me: when running a Ceph pool you are supposed to have one thread per drive for the monitor task. Splitting the drive into two won't change the ram requirement as that is per TB of storage, but you double the core count allocated to your storage. If you are running hyperconverged on something like Proxmox then that's fewer cores available for VMs. But then, I guess on an Epyc you are unlikely to run out of cores

[Tabbykatze]

But then, I guess on an Epyc you are unlikely to run out of cores

[drawde_bono77]

Ok, wait a second. I think it's really awful to speak so easily and just say"remember this is a twin 7GB(sic) HDD" not even to underestimate the unit you did it correctly conducting TB with GB, but you say "it's really a twin hdd" as if Seagate's new technology was just like sawdwiching 2 hard drives. If 7TBhdds existed, maybe, but that's not even a standard data storage measure

[DanceswithUnix]

Ok, wait a second. I think it's really awful to speak so easily and just say"remember this is a twin 7GB(sic) HDD" not even to underestimate the unit you did it correctly conducting TB with GB, but you say "it's really a twin hdd" as if Seagate's new technology was just like sawdwiching 2 hard drives. If 7TBhdds existed, maybe, but that's not even a standard data storage measure

Clearly it isn't two drives inside, but if that is what it pretends to be to the outside world then that has changes how you can use the drive.

To be honest, I only think this is new technology because no-one thought it was worth doing before. It looks like the answer to "Who even asked for this?" is that Microsoft are buying them. Just trying to work out why.

[LSG501]

It looks like the answer to "Who even asked for this?" is that Microsoft are buying them. Just trying to work out why.

MS are likely using them in xcloud for game/data storage although they do of course have azure and onedrive etc.

If they do act or can act like a fast raid drive while giving decent capacity at better costs than ssd's (I'd expect them to be cheaper) then it would likely be more than good enough for xcloud streaming, it's not like many people will be streaming at more than 500MB/s

[GordonGout]

So let me get this right, it offers 524MB/s ... but only if its striped? Tell me again why I'd not just buy 2 drives in the first place? Like everyone's saying, twice the failure rate and whos to say that if one side fails its not going to detrimentally impact the other side

[DanceswithUnix]

MS are likely using them in xcloud for game/data storage although they do of course have azure and onedrive etc.

If they do act or can act like a fast raid drive while giving decent capacity at better costs than ssd's (I'd expect them to be cheaper) then it would likely be more than good enough for xcloud streaming, it's not like many people will be streaming at more than 500MB/s

I'm sure a conventional raid 6 stripe could take anything that the Internet can throw at it. I was more expecting some sort of Azure usage, where they must feel that a conventional hard drive isn't *quite* fast enough but a doubling in performance would fix.

So let me get this right, it offers 524MB/s ... but only if its striped? Tell me again why I'd not just buy 2 drives in the first place? Like everyone's saying, twice the failure rate and whos to say that if one side fails its not going to detrimentally impact the other side

Sort of. You need to push accesses into both halves, and striping is just the easy old school way to do that. Always comes down to cost though. If this is similar cost to a standard 14TB drive then you get free performance. You are buying a more complex head mechanism along with a second arm servo with associated driving electronics. The processor looking after all this has to be faster, but Moore's Law might mean it already was fast enough. I'm not seeing a massive increase in cost, but I imagine those two servos will be shaking each other about a bit so there might be some hefty development costs to cover right now.

If one half fails, then you have to swap out that half to heal the raid array, but that's not really any worse than a conventional drive where one damaged platter swaps out the whole drive. It might be better if you are using something like Ceph where the data will just migrate away from the damage, I assume Microsoft have copied Ceph ideas by now?

[the_Unforgiven]

2 drives, I bet you it will cost twice the price
That has me seeing red, not green with envy