News Seagate Launches 2nd Gen Dual-Actuator HDDs: 18TB at 554 MBps

[Admin]

Seagate's new Mach.2 dual-actuator hard drives gain capacity and performance.

Seagate Launches 2nd Gen Dual-Actuator HDDs: 18TB at 554 MBps : Read more

 

[BX4096]

How's Seagate's failure rates nowadays? I stopped buying from them entirely years ago, after I noticed that something like 80% of all my failed drives were by Seagate.

 

[WrongRookie]

How's Seagate's failure rates nowadays? I stopped buying from them entirely years ago, after I noticed that something like 80% of all my failed drives were by Seagate.

Still frequent I'm afraid..

Backblaze finds Seagate disk drives fail most often – Blocks and Files

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has found that Seagate disk drives failed more often in the last quarter than those from other suppliers. It accumulates failure statistics every quarter for its tens of thousands of disk drives and uses these to calculate life time annualised failure rate (AFR)...

blocksandfiles.com

Don't know about this year though.

Just imagine if they tried selling this but as firecuda/barracuda. Could give less reasons to go for sata SSDs of 2 or 4 tb..

 

[NeatOman]

Still frequent I'm afraid..

Backblaze finds Seagate disk drives fail most often – Blocks and Files

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has found that Seagate disk drives failed more often in the last quarter than those from other suppliers. It accumulates failure statistics every quarter for its tens of thousands of disk drives and uses these to calculate life time annualised failure rate (AFR)...

blocksandfiles.com

Don't know about this year though.

Just imagine if they tried selling this but as firecuda/barracuda. Could give less reasons to go for sata SSDs of 2 or 4 tb..

That's still Massively better than it was before when they had to draw there warranties back to just a year 😵 this was around the 2010's and WD went though a similar quality phase, but not nearly as bad imo. But going from over 10% on AVERAGE to about 2% is "good". But you're right, in comparison it's still 2x worse than the field. I still use the old Toshiba drives that where rebranded HSGT drives, and had effectively the same HSGT drives before that 😗 and WD black back in the late 00's and good old Seagates when they where made as well as the best of them in the early mid 00's.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Give it to me, I want the Dual Actuator tech =D.

 

[bit_user]

WD went though a similar quality phase, but not nearly as bad imo.

WD made the smart move of buying HGST. It took a really long time to get them merged, but I think all of their HDDs are now HGST-designed.

 

[bit_user]

Why! it doubles the chance of failure.

More than that, I expect.

I wonder how much they have to account for one actuator actually moving the drive. In the worst case, they might not be able to read or write while the other actuator is seeking.

The dual actuator just means that you have a central Disk with 2 reading arms either side of it.

That doesn't sound like what the article is saying.

It certainly won't double reading time

The article claims there are indeed performance benefits. Otherwise, what's the point?

Performance is really becoming an issue, as HDD capacities continue to scale. Backups and RAID rebuilds are now taking multiple days.

 

[Umfriend]

Why! it doubles the chance of failure. The dual actuator just means that you have a central Disk with 2 reading arms either side of it. It certainly won't double reading time, it adds complexity to the controller circuit, needs more Cache and has double the chance of failing due to power loss when the drive is reading or writing, or when the case receives shock whist in use.
Otherwise it is a decent Idea, like a multicore CPU.

Actually, no. There is a single spindle but the actuators are located on top of each other. The advantage is that they can operate independent of each other, each on half of the platters. It's more like having 2 HDD inside one package or Raid-0 like.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Why! it doubles the chance of failure. The dual actuator just means that you have a central Disk with 2 reading arms either side of it. It certainly won't double reading time, it adds complexity to the controller circuit, needs more Cache and has double the chance of failing due to power loss when the drive is reading or writing, or when the case receives shock whist in use.
Otherwise it is a decent Idea, like a multicore CPU.

The whole point is Seagate needs to build in a internal RAID 0 to improve performance without me having to do anything.

That's the whole point of Multi-Actuator

 

[bit_user]

The whole point is Seagate needs to build in a internal RAID 0 to improve performance without me having to do anything.

That's the whole point of Multi-Actuator

Yes, they need to find a way to improve HDD throughput within the confines of a standard 3.5" enclosure. The right way to think about this is improving HDD performance density.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Yes, they need to find a way to improve HDD throughput within the confines of a standard 3.5" enclosure. The right way to think about this is improving HDD performance density.

That happens naturally anyways, the biggest improvement in HDD is "Multi-Actuator".

The part they haven't leveraged is RAID 0 internally to maximize linear sustained throughput.

I'm not expecting Random Performance to increase, but linear throughput should increase dramatically.

Eventually, if you keep going down the "Multi-Acutator" tech tree, you could get to the point where every arm is individually moving and you are reading & writing from as many arms as possible to fulfill increased stacked throughput via internal RAID.

 

[bit_user]

That happens naturally anyways,

Not fast enough. Increasing areal density tends to give you a natural increase at the square root of the platter capacity, which eventually becomes a problem for backup times & RAID rebuild times.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Not fast enough. Increasing areal density tends to give you a natural increase at the square root of the platter capacity, which eventually becomes a problem for backup times & RAID rebuild times.

I concur, that's why I'm WAY more excited over "Multi-Actuator" tech, that can help grow linear/sustained transfer throughput at a greater rate.

The one stat that HDD's seem to need the most.

While NAND Flash is getting slower with every extra bit thrown into each cell.

QLC is already at HDD speeds in some cases or worse, it's only going to get worse with PLC (5-bits per cell) and growing.

 

[bit_user]

And it brings with it all the problems associated with raid 0 , and how when the drive starts filling up, the drive indexing also takes a shot at the efficiency, as too does the complexity of the controller.

The article said that part is under control of the host software. My guess is that the sectors are evenly divided between the two sets of platters.

It will at best speed up loading times, but it won't match SSD levels, and largely you'llnot see any FPS improvement.

This is for enterprise and datacenter customers. If they're ever marketed to consumers, it would be as NAS drives.

And one arm fails, the whole thing is useless

Heh, not necessarily. The rest of the drive could potentially remain readable.

Anyway, these would be used in RAID 6 or in distributed filesystems with replication. The reliability merely needs to be adequate for the level of fault-tolerance in use.

 

[boe]

So where the heck are they?

 

[bit_user]

So where the heck are they?

I'd guess they're provided only to large customers. According to the article, software changes are needed to properly utilize them, which means they're unlikely to reach consumers unless/until Windows gets patched with support for them.

"Seagate's hermetically sealed and helium-filled Mach.2 hard drives with two actuators are essentially two logical HDDs (of 9TB or 8TB capacity) that are independently addressable and therefore need some software tweaks on the host side."​

If you really want to try and acquire some, a good place to start might be the "Talk to an Expert" function, on their website.

Exos 2X18 Hard Drive | Seagate US