Seagate Announces Dual-Actuator MACH.2 Drive - and Star Wars, Black Panther Themed Drives (seagate.com) 47
An anonymous reader writes that Seagate Technology has launched its second generation dual actuator MACH.2 series hard drives. "Computing power, storage capacities, and storage performance: all must continue moving forward in order for technology innovators to solve humanity's greatest challenges," boasts Seagate's page for the drives:
MACH.2 is the world's first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive.... MACH.2 provides up to 2x performance — with two independent actuators and data paths, it enables concurrent I/O streams to and from the host.
Seagate claims it offers "optimal latency" by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.
And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It's in addition to Seagate's officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering "the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.") Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel's Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .
Seagate claims it offers "optimal latency" by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.
And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It's in addition to Seagate's officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering "the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.") Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel's Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .
Not dual head stacks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Around 10-20 years ago, one drive maker had two sets of drive heads, around 180 degrees apart. The heads were active/active, so both could be used independently to read/write data, and if one set of heads failed, the other could handle all the reading/writing. Wish HDD makers would go back to that style as opposed to one half the heads doing one thing and another something differently...
The weird thing is how the drive is laid out. From what the specs say, when this drive is plugged in, it is enumerated as two 7 TB logical units. Of course, this is going to take some thought when doing RAID, because RAID 5, and maybe even RAID 6 can be rendered useless. It is going to take quadruple parity, so if two drives fail, the four sub-drives are taken into account, or the drives are used in pairs or trios in a RAID 10/triple mirror configuration. Of course, the two sub-drives could just be striped as RAID 0, then that RAID 0 construct added to RAID 5 or RAID 6 where the drive will be, but it means another layer of bit twiddling for the RAID system to deal with.
Overall... cool idea, but wish Seagate would have gone with two sets of drive heads, so this thing about carving up a 14 drive into two LUNs wasn't needed to be done.
Re: Not dual head stacks? (Score:1)
Re: Not dual head stacks? (Score:5, Informative)
There's been two approaches to this.
Seagate's current one is that you have a single stack that's split down the middle. Upper and lower halves move independently. Meaning it's effectively two thin drives stacked on top of each other. It's not too bad of an idea except for that I presume some of the electronics are shared, so both of them could be killed by a single fault.
Apparently, some previous attempt at this completely duplicated the head stack, meaning each platter had 4 heads allocated to it -- above and below, and a copy on the opposite side. Presumably such a drive can read two tracks from the same platter on the same side at once, read a single track in half a rotation by splitting the job, or use the second head for verification. Another possible upside is that it could survive the failure of a head/stack since there's another one that could do the job, assuming the platter wasn't damaged.
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It's not too bad of an idea except for that I presume some of the electronics are shared, so both of them could be killed by a single fault.
No matter how much of the electronics are duplicated for redundancy, the connection to the controlling device is across an interface which is always a potential single point of failure on any drive.
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Not only some electronics are shared, but, in some SAS units, the write cache cannot be enabled/disabled independently. Changing the setting on one half of the drive is immediately reflected on the other.
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Re:Not dual head stacks? (Score:5, Informative)
Around 10-20 years ago, one drive maker had two sets of drive heads, around 180 degrees apart. The heads were active/active, so both could be used independently to read/write data, and if one set of heads failed, the other could handle all the reading/writing. Wish HDD makers would go back to that style as opposed to one half the heads doing one thing and another something differently...
I remmeber those "before times", those disks you are talking about were of the 5.25" persuation, with more space to play around, and no standarization of port positions (differently than our modern SATA and SAS), sadly, those big sizes and free-willing port placements are not comming back.
Besides, if a head failed in those hacylon times, it meant a head crash, with the acompaning groove in the platter media and metal specs in the clean air oof the HDD rendering the other head set useless in a short ammount of time, a second set of RW heads is not a substitute for propper backups.
And, for a last nail in the coffin, coordinating the writing so that one head did not overwrite more recent data from the other head has quite a difficult ask.
This way is easier for everyone involved (HW designers, OS designers, Storage Designers)
The weird thing is how the drive is laid out. From what the specs say, when this drive is plugged in, it is enumerated as two 7 TB logical units. Of course, this is going to take some thought when doing RAID, because RAID 5, and maybe even RAID 6 can be rendered useless.
Not at all. First and foremost, these are not "drives for normies". These frives do not go in your computer case, or your Synology or QNAP. These are SAS datacenter drives. One only hopes these people know what they are doing. Actually, I used to teach those people. You use these drives in two ways:
First, in advanced distributed filesystems. Let's use Hadoop as an example. Hadoop stores data x3 (or more). If you are using these drives, you will command hadoop to store 2 copies of your data in two different machines on the same rack, and the 3rd copy in a machine on a different rack, and you do not even have to concern yoursel with which half of the drive has which piece of data.
The second option is to use these drives inside "Big Boy/Girl Storage". Huawei Oceanstore 5xxx series was my particular workhorse, but let's use the smaller 2600 as an example. Using only the controller (with no shelves), you have 12 bays for drives. With normal drives you would do one 12x 14TB drive RAID-6. With these mach.2, you would do 2 12x 7TB RAID-6s, one with all the "upper halves" and one with all the "lower halves". Or better yet, let RAID 2.0 (huawei's marketing term) handle all the details for you.
It is going to take quadruple parity, so if two drives fail, the four sub-drives are taken into account, or the drives are used in pairs or trios in a RAID 10/triple mirror configuration. Of course, the two sub-drives could just be striped as RAID 0, then that RAID 0 construct added to RAID 5 or RAID 6 where the drive will be, but it means another layer of bit twiddling for the RAID system to deal with.
Dude, you are overcomplicating it.
Overall... cool idea, but wish Seagate would have gone with two sets of drive heads, so this thing about carving up a 14 drive into two LUNs wasn't needed to be done.
Again, two sets of heads was not such a good idea to begin with.
Re:Not dual head stacks? (Score:5, Interesting)
For consumer devices ... probably not. But as you point out, these are for the high-end of the consumer market, where you probably buy chassis by the two truck-load, your air conditioning units by the three truck-load, and your drives by the initial truck-load, then a weekly carry-able box for maintenance. If you have a business or technical need for, say 100TB assemblies, you're probably not going to be bothered too much if you have to include connectors for water-cooling into the drive bodies themselves. You're going to have more project-limiting engineering issues to solve.
Dude, your spelling checker needs a baseball bat massage. Whatever. The aerodynamic and air flow design of those drives tried (not necessarily "succeeded") to arrange airflow and centrifugal "force" (inertia) to move the debris out towards the edge of the disc, then off into "space" where the debris would be collected by a filter of some sort. How effective it was ... well, most people only noticed their drive's last head crash. How many it had before hand ... well, you probably get a daily email of the S.M.A.R.T. results for every drive in the systems you manage, and produce a prioritised list of change orders for your minion to implement. Before coffee break.
On the subject of dinosaur pens, did you ever see someone getting a hard drive to walk across the computer room? Allegedly someone did it at my university most years, but only in the CS lab, where they had a PDP rackmounted in a wheeled cabinet.
That would only be an issue if you needed this thing for sustained high-speed writing at the double-speed rate - which would pretty much mean an "AV"-like data collection application. For which, you wouldn't use spinning rust, you'd use a front-end storage of SSDs (or main memory, even) and then offload the completed file to the spinning rust at a more leisurely pace, when you know the size of each file. Then you could avoid the "overwriting" issue by using one head to write file block X to one head set on cylinder Y, while the other head wrote block (X+[sizeof{cylinder})to cylinder Y+1. That's exactly the sort of thing that OS have been doing since the days of disc-memory replacing drum memory [catb.org]. A detail that makes the device driver for the disc a little more complicated, but at higher levels does not need to be known.
If your data center (eek - my spelling checker caught me typing in EN_US! Obviously I mean "centre".) is already using drives that have multiple platters in one user-ready brick, internally it's probably using such logic already to write data to 3 (5, 7 ...) heads at a time, separated by [sizeof(platter_side)*1,2,3,4...] depending on how many platters you have. So if you were willing to accept that you couldn't write small files at maximum speed, you could increase your write speed by a factor of the number of platters (above the "waste" positioning platter). You'd probably want your OS to make some deliberate choices about where to write "big,fast" files to, and where to write "small,slow" to. Nothing challenging there to OS writers who have simultaneously written data to the spinning rust and to the tape ("sliding rust"?) device. Or even, to serial.
If, and only if, you ca
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That does make sense. Hadoop, or on a smaller scale, MinIO, where the application handles RAID through erasure coding on a higher tier of the stack than normal RAID would. Combine that with multiple nodes and a load balancer, and that does provide a good amount of HDD tier performance. Essentially two in one.
Disclaimer: Even MinIO doesn't really scale as much as Hadoop does, one can toss a bunch of nodes in a rack, and get some decent S3 performance out of it. You could just toss XFS on a bunch of thes
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The weird thing is how the drive is laid out. From what the specs say, when this drive is plugged in, it is enumerated as two 7 TB logical units. Of course, this is going to take some thought when doing RAID, because RAID 5, and maybe even RAID 6 can be rendered useless.
Just combine those 2 logical unit in a stripe (raid 0) then, use 3 of those drive for raid 5, for example. I don't see any problems there! You could also set those 2 logical unit as mirror of each other and use 3 of those disk for raid 5, etc. etc.
Why would it render raid 5 and raid 6 useless?
Re: Not dual head stacks? (Score:2)
RAID5/6 across bottom halves, RAID5/6 across all upper halves, create a stripe across those two. That's really not difficult.
I don't want to get all smarmy like that guy with his Huawei, this isn't enterprise grade storage array design, it's just basic how you'd put two shelves of disks together, with big dumb boxes of disks or a SMB oriented array. Something any software raid ought to be able to tackle perfectly fine.
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I remember HP making those drives back in the day. They could simultaneously read and write data.
The problem with those dr
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Worlds first? (Score:5, Interesting)
As usual you do a little research and find out IBM was doing that decades ago. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/histor... [ibm.com]
Same with virtual machines. They offered that in the 1970s.
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Conner did it in the late 80's or 1990 too. And Conner's was SCSI and usable in a PC.
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IBM also got the Star-Wars theme early with their infamous "Deathstar".
Star Wars themes on Hard Drives? (Score:2)
Seriously? Could you maybe save the money you blow on these rights and put it into the hardware? Or, here's a crazy idea, make the shit cheaper by that amount?
Star Wars themed computer hardware .... and I thought the whole Alienware bullshit was ridiculous.
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Seriously? Could you maybe save the money you blow on these rights and put it into the hardware? Or, here's a crazy idea, make the shit cheaper by that amount?
Star Wars themed computer hardware .... and I thought the whole Alienware bullshit was ridiculous.
The starwars/marvel/et al drives are EXTERNAL drives. Those tend to compete both in Specs AND aestethics.
WD made theirs look like a book (mybook). And believe you me, molding that acrylic in the shape of a book shoul have been expensive as hell.
Seagate at some point made theirs have a light show on the front (the go line, I still have an enclosure lying around).
The three manufacturers (Seagate, WD and Toshiba) had the same (external) drives in different plastic colours (adding to manufacturing and inventory
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I suspected so ... thanks for wasting the time to confirm it.
It's skin-deep technology - the skin in question being on the top of the paint in the tin.
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People buy their backup tools based on appearance rather than reliability? For real?
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For most people, an external drive is an external drive. You may get some features like hardware AES encryption that the MyBooks offer, as well as some software bundles like Acronis, but for most intents and purposes, plug a drive in, and it stores stuff... until it breaks. This is why a lot of companies sell drives with custom form factors, like the book shape, or CNC machined aluminum drives if one has a Mac.
In general, the average user doesn't really know or care about backups. On the Mac side, pluggi
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You'd have to install it on a drive set to slave for that to work.
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Yah, Seagate needs to concentrate on reliability for their desktop series. I trust Ironwolf NAS, but won't try investing in a desktop-class drive from them unless things change radically
Don't know why (Score:2)
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I need a themed drive, the marketing licensing fees will end up costing me in the end
The starwars/marvel themed drives are not for your datacenter, they are external drives for your offspring.
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they are external drives for your offspring.
Geez I didn't know these had optional parts. BRB
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they are external drives for your offspring.
Geez I didn't know these had optional parts. BRB
Think of these drives as sock stuffers for your offspring.
I'd love a black panther drive! So sexy and sleak (Score:2)
https://www.seagate.com/au/en/products/gaming-drives/special-editions/black-panther/
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Hey! No kinkshaming!
What, no Deathstar-themed drive ? (Score:2)
I guess IBM must have bought the rights for their 75GXP.
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Next step ... (Score:4, Funny)
Gillette: Pardon me ...
Re: Next step ... (Score:2)
Loriciels would also have something to say about that. If they still were still around.
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Multiple actuators (Score:1)
Why not put each drive head on a separate actuator? And multiple heads per platter surface, potential data throughput would easily be in excess of SATA limits.
What cereal boxes do they come in? (Score:2)
re (Score:1)
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