Seagate demos 480MB/s helium-based Exos X14 HDD

[HEXUS]

And claims its HAMR technology heads are more reliable than the industry standard.

Read more.

[afiretruck]

I do hope the Mach.2 tech filters down to the smaller (2TB+) consumer drivers. Would be a fantastic stop-gap while 2TB SSDs are still an order of magnitude more expensive.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It's got fricking lasers! INSTABUY!

[Xlucine]

I do hope the Mach.2 tech filters down to the smaller (2TB+) consumer drivers. Would be a fantastic stop-gap while 2TB SSDs are still an order of magnitude more expensive.

Why not just RAID?

[kompukare]

Since burst mode max transfer rates have been mostly meaningless for decades, who cares?
Random IOPS is why informed people buy SSDs, not theoretical max burst rates

[afiretruck]

Why not just RAID?

Assuming you mean to use 2 regular HDDs in RAID 0 to replace a Mach.2 drive.

Many reasons: Cost, physical space requirements, and RAID hardware (or CPU overhead for software RAID) to name a few.

Okay, cost is really dependent on how much the premium Mach.2 adds to the total value of the drives individually, but power consumption would be higher for 2 separate HDDs.

[Hoonigan]

attragction

Slight spelling error. Just a heads up

[DanceswithUnix]

Since burst mode max transfer rates have been mostly meaningless for decades, who cares?
Random IOPS is why informed people buy SSDs, not theoretical max burst rates

That's pretty much my take on these too.

Hard disks are used for watching videos (replacing VHS) and backups (replacing QIC). Really, HDD is the tape drive of the modern age. For enterprise backup use, once you get a single RAID6 stripe of drives you can outpace an 10GbE network connection even with cheapish SATA drives.

I presume Seagate have customers lined up, but I have to wonder if I am missing something as it just smacks of Seagate trying to appear relevant in performance storage which spinning rust just isn't.

[kingpotnoodle]

I do hope the Mach.2 tech filters down to the smaller (2TB+) consumer drivers. Would be a fantastic stop-gap while 2TB SSDs are still an order of magnitude more expensive.

Why not just RAID?

Because RAID-0 of hard drives has double the failure rate, so if you care at all about the data it means RAID 10 which is minimum 4 drives. Thus at least 4x the space, power and noise as well as cost. And after all that effort hard drive is still hard drive and most performance metrics are still bad compared to even the most basic SSD.

Nobody uses hard drives for performance anymore, it's nice to have them a bit faster but really it's just polishing a turd from a performance perspective.

[Xlucine]

Assuming you mean to use 2 regular HDDs in RAID 0 to replace a Mach.2 drive.

Many reasons: Cost, physical space requirements, and RAID hardware (or CPU overhead for software RAID) to name a few.

Okay, cost is really dependent on how much the premium Mach.2 adds to the total value of the drives individually, but power consumption would be higher for 2 separate HDDs.

Don't most motherboards come with basis RAID baked in these days? Power consumption would be higher, probably, which is a big issue for a server farm running 100s of drives but an extra few watts load for a home user is not significant.

Because RAID-0 of hard drives has double the failure rate, so if you care at all about the data it means RAID 10 which is minimum 4 drives. Thus at least 4x the space, power and noise as well as cost. And after all that effort hard drive is still hard drive and most performance metrics are still bad compared to even the most basic SSD.

Nobody uses hard drives for performance anymore, it's nice to have them a bit faster but really it's just polishing a turd from a performance perspective.

They're talking about better IOPS, so RAID 1 - data mirroring built in, unlike the mach.2 equipped drives. If you only want a 2 TB drive, twice the space and power is not an issue

[DanceswithUnix]

Because RAID-0 of hard drives has double the failure rate, so if you care at all about the data it means RAID 10 which is minimum 4 drives. Thus at least 4x the space, power and noise as well as cost. And after all that effort hard drive is still hard drive and most performance metrics are still bad compared to even the most basic SSD.

Nobody uses hard drives for performance anymore, it's nice to have them a bit faster but really it's just polishing a turd from a performance perspective.

There is a common Linux hack to do RAID10 on two drives using 4 partitions. It is basically to get around the fact that RAID1 on Linux software RAID doesn't (didn't?) interleave reads well across multiple drives. It is a fun hack to know about, but in reality it seems too much complication and faff so I just use RAID 1

https://blog.a2o.si/2014/09/07/linux...ead-of-raid-1/

[afiretruck]

Don't most motherboards come with basis RAID baked in these days?

Usually that stuff is "fake RAID" where the motherboard presents a thin RAID controller to the OS, but all of the calculations and disk controlling, etc are performed in software drivers. It's cheap & cheerful and does the job just fine for 9/10 people, but it's still effectively software RAID when you get down to it.

[afiretruck]

There is a common Linux hack to do RAID10 on two drives using 4 partitions. It is basically to get around the fact that RAID1 on Linux software RAID doesn't (didn't?) interleave reads well across multiple drives. It is a fun hack to know about, but in reality it seems too much complication and faff so I just use RAID 1

https://blog.a2o.si/2014/09/07/linux...ead-of-raid-1/

Have you read the final update at the top? RAID 10 far-2 seems to be the way to go nowadays

EDIT: Thinking about it, are there many real-world cases where traditional RAID1 would be better? I'm guessing when you're reading multiple files at once. Has anyone tried RAID10-f2 and found it to be worse for them than good old RAID1?

[DanceswithUnix]

Have you read the final update at the top? RAID 10 far-2 seems to be the way to go nowadays

No, I just remembered the idea from when I set up my raid-1 which I think predates that update. That's a shame, it is sort of Trigger's RAID array having had disk fails and swaps so the same data now resides on different drives and will likely stay like that for another 5 years, and some free performance is always nice but I can't be bothered to back up and migrate the date to a new stripe layout

[kingpotnoodle]

They're talking about better IOPS, so RAID 1 - data mirroring built in, unlike the mach.2 equipped drives. If you only want a 2 TB drive, twice the space and power is not an issue

RAID 1 will never boost write IOPs and doesn't boost read in all implementations.

There is a common Linux hack to do RAID10 on two drives using 4 partitions. It is basically to get around the fact that RAID1 on Linux software RAID doesn't (didn't?) interleave reads well across multiple drives. It is a fun hack to know about, but in reality it seems too much complication and faff so I just use RAID 1

https://blog.a2o.si/2014/09/07/linux...ead-of-raid-1/

Interesting hack, been a long time since I did a two drive RAID with mdraid so I'd not seen that before. Won't do anything for write performance though sadly, that's where a proper RAID 10 comes in.

[tinbin]

I want one lol ... be too expensive....