Sorry to hit you today with all this pent-up frustration, that's really been building for year and has less relevance than ever, now that HDDs have been relegated to "tape replacememnt for the poor"...
But...
It just bothers me that you keep citing things like:
"The Seagate Skyhawk AI HDD is designed with “AI'' firmware to improve the drive’s ability to handle recording, video analysis, and GPU analytics workloads. This includes up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams with zero dropped frames"
without informing potential buyers that they have zero practical chance of using that or that in fact any attempt to even or copy two or three streams is just as likely to cause issues on these drivers as on any other HDD.
Because to my understanding (and in theory I could be mistaken, although I very much doubt it) this only would have any chance of working if the operating system, its cache manager, its file system and all the low level drivers were to actually
instruct the drive how to deal with blocks it's being given to write and read.
Because this is all the drive actually does: it follows orders, which can be given in much more detail using ATA command extensions for streams... which the drive understands but no mainstream (pun intended) file system known to me actually
speaks.
There is a pretty good chance some set-top box or HDD video recorder might have actually implemented them as well as 100% proprietary video surveillance black boxes, but Windows or Linux? Perhaps I missed that, but I don't think I did.
And then the "additional intelligence" of this drive's firmware mostly consists in it not trying to second guess the OS with its own proprietary caching algorithm, but doing exactly as told. It's the OS who will then have to interleave those 64 or 32 streams of data in exactly such a way that they can be laid down sequentially on the drive, because that mechanical beast is still operating sequentially and can only read or write singe blocks one after the other. It also then promises to not bother trying to correct data that might have been read or written with consistency warnings,
if so instructed, because that might collaps the interleaved data queue and having a slight smudge on a surveilleance video may be less of an issue than a total loss of multiple seconds on all 64 cams because a single disk error is getting 20 correction attempts...
I know, writing for money is getting harder with all that AI competition out there and marketing people paid to overstuff consumers and editors with pseudo features. But please, from time to time, turn on your brains and think about what you copy & paste.
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