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[TH]Seagate To Double HDD Speed With Multi-Actuator Technology

5K views 83 replies 50 participants last post by  nvidiaftw12 
#1 ·
The article has one of the coolest GIFs ever. They could have doubled performance long ago -- independent actuator arms look surprisingly less complex than I thought.

Quote:
We already know that HDDs suddenly have a new lease on life with new recording technologies, but now your next hard drive may be twice as fast as any drive on the market. Seagate announced that it plans to double the performance of its future HDDs with its multi-actuator technology.


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-multi-actuator-heads-seagate,36132.html
 
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#2 ·
Props to them, but how much does it cost? SSD's are very reasonably priced now a days, so it can't cost much more than a traditional hard drive.
 
#5 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by epic1337 View Post

i have always wondered why this isn't more of a prevalent feature, specially when compared to 10K and 15K harddrives.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Power Drill View Post

Yay... more moving components... more reliable... yes.
rolleyes.gif
I was thinking the same thing... Seems to be too little, too late. Especially if they're trying to charge more for this technology vs SSD pricing.
Quote:
Increasing HDD performance won't place them on par with SSDs, or even close, but it will address the IOPS per TB challenges that will crop up with next-gen recording technologies.
Is this relevant to consumer marketed HDDs? I'm guessing no unless you plan on hosting your own server with many simultaneous read and writes.
 
#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by bajer29 View Post

Is this relevant to consumer marketed HDDs? I'm guessing no unless you plan on hosting your own server with many simultaneous read and writes.
i think it makes sense, if you had a 10TB HDD full of data, and you need to make a data integrity sweep, it'll take over 10hours to do it with only ~200MB/s speed.

or to put it in another example, a virus scan on the same HDD would also take over 10hours to finish.
 
#7 ·
Ah, yes... I didn't think of that. However, I'll probably not be in the market for a 10TB driver any time soon.
tongue.gif
 
#8 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by bajer29 View Post

Ah, yes... I didn't think of that. However, I'll probably not be in the market for a 10TB driver any time soon.
tongue.gif
yeah, it'll take a few more years for 5TB+ to become mainstream.
 
#9 ·
Mechanical drives are becoming cool again
tongue.gif
. All joking aside its cool to see this market moving again.
 
#10 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by jarble View Post

Mechanical drives are becoming cool again
tongue.gif
. All joking aside its cool to see this market moving again.
It really hasnt stopped moving. But in terms of speed its been pretty stagnant.
 
#11 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Twinnuke View Post

Quote:
Originally Posted by jarble View Post

Mechanical drives are becoming cool again
tongue.gif
. All joking aside its cool to see this market moving again.
It really hasnt stopped moving. But in terms of speed its been pretty stagnant.
actually the speed had been somewhat slowly increasing.

i remember a few years back the average is ~120MB/s, but now a days its around ~160MB/s, with a few rare cases exceeding 180MB/s.
of course most of this is attributed to the platter density increase, but they're also probably on the upper limit in that regard as well.
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Power Drill View Post

Yay... more moving components... more reliable... yes.
rolleyes.gif
I know the data proves it wrong but my personal experience with SSDs and HDDs leave me to not put anything critical on an SSD. I buy lots of diff brands and model HDDs and rarely have issues for many many years. Yet literally every SSD I've bought has failed on me so far within a 5 to 7 year time frame. I sell any SSD I own after 3 to 4 years use now no matter what, cause after that long I no longer feel safe keeping data on them...

I will only use SSD for OS and games now, never for any kind of mass long term storage. So I'm quite happy to see advancements in HDD tech. So yea... Unless SSD becomes cheaper than HDD I won't be moving to SSD only any time soon...
 
#14 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by epic1337 View Post

actually the speed had been somewhat slowly increasing.

i remember a few years back the average is ~120MB/s, but now a days its around ~160MB/s, with a few rare cases exceeding 180MB/s.
of course most of this is attributed to the platter density increase, but they're also probably on the upper limit in that regard as well.
My 10TB Seagate Ironwolf easily reaches 220MB/s on sequential speeds during Windows file copy.

Since my home network is 10Gbps ethernet, I will welcome the speed increase.
 
#15 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by epic1337 View Post

actually the speed had been somewhat slowly increasing.

i remember a few years back the average is ~120MB/s, but now a days its around ~160MB/s, with a few rare cases exceeding 180MB/s.
of course most of this is attributed to the platter density increase, but they're also probably on the upper limit in that regard as well.
Still slower than the update to SATA in 2004.

Seriously, SATA II and its 3Gb/s data rate are almost 14 years old and a single HDD is not capable of saturating it yet.

Neat tech from Seagate though. It's almost like an internal RAID 0 array in some sense.
thumb.gif
 
#16 ·
Quote:
But Will It Work Like A Normal Drive?
Seagate has not confirmed that the new multi-actuator drives will adhere to the standard dimensions of the 3.5" form factor, but that seems likely, because it would ensure broad compatibility with existing infrastructure.
...OK, but what about 2.5"?
 
#19 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by CynicalUnicorn View Post

Still slower than the update to SATA in 2004.

Seriously, SATA II and its 3Gb/s data rate are almost 14 years old and a single HDD is not capable of saturating it yet.

Neat tech from Seagate though. It's almost like an internal RAID 0 array in some sense.
thumb.gif
SATA 3Gbps actual max speed is around 260MB/s, and thats the same speed the newer 12TB WD Gold and Seagate Ironwolf are getting for both read and write, so its pretty much saturated after all those years.
biggrin.gif
 
#21 ·
It's an interesting take on things, that's for sure. Curious what the price increase is going to be though. Like others have said, it can't be too much more than current drives because otherwise it becomes a case of "solid state is faster and cheaper" which is a bad combination to market against.
 
#22 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Colin1204 View Post

I know the data proves it wrong but my personal experience with SSDs and HDDs leave me to not put anything critical on an SSD.
You should never have only one copy of anything critical as most any storage media can fail without warning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Artikbot View Post

2.5" is SSD territory anyway.
I can get 5TB 2.5" mechanical drives for not much over $150 dollars.

SSDs still need a way to go before hitting that territory of price per GB.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteWulfe View Post

It's an interesting take on things, that's for sure. Curious what the price increase is going to be though. Like others have said, it can't be too much more than current drives because otherwise it becomes a case of "solid state is faster and cheaper" which is a bad combination to market against.
Shouldn't cost too much more to add a second actuator.

I'm guessing the small cost in materials, plus development of firmware to handle things, will translate into a 10-15% bump in retail price per of the first generation of drives.
 
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#23 ·
I upgraded from a 1 TB WD Black (from 2010) to a 2 TB Black just recently and was wondering just that - why hasn't this been done earlier? They cite costs, but I wonder how much it would have added.

Anyway, this is great, it's like internal RAID, after all. The performance of the new 2 TB drive at first seemed much better (and way more silent), but as soon as I filled it up halfway the sequential speed dropped from 200 MB/s to around 175 MB/s and drops below 170 MB/s with a web browser open with several tabs open and the more it fills up, the slower it gets. The noise while doing random operations also increased practically to the level of the one I was using before (this will probably get worse with multiple actuators unless they use some more sound insulation).

The random performance is also still the big limitation which could be greatly alleviated with multiple actuators - but in that respect, and seeing how capacities are set to increase a lot in coming ears, I would go as far as suggest that for desktops they bring back a long dead form factor (for HDD's) - the 5.25' one. That way they would potentially have space to put up to three / four sets of double actuators in there. We have the desktop cases (well, excluding some fancy new ones), make it happen!

As has been said, I also don't trust SSDs with important data. And the price per GB on an SSD is still too high to replace all HDDs. If I wanted a 2 TB SSD, I'd have to pay at least 600 € for one, but it can go above 700 € for better models. A normal 2 TB HDD costs below 80 € and the WD Black does cost a premium over 100 €, but it's faster and has been a very reliable series for me. And this is for 2 TB capacities, which is nothing extraordinary. You can't even buy higher capacities consumer SSDs anyway.
 
#24 ·
Please people, lamenting on HDD death. I just bought an 8TB HDD for $300. Just looked for a 8TB SSD on Amazon.ca, HMMM... NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. For mass storage, you still can't beat an HDD.
 
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#25 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by tpi2007 View Post

I upgraded from a 1 TB WD Black (from 2010) to a 2 TB Black just recently and was wondering just that - why hasn't this been done earlier? They cite costs, but I wonder how much it would have added.

Anyway, this is great, it's like internal RAID, after all. The performance of the new 2 TB drive at first seemed much better (and way more silent), but as soon as I filled it up halfway the sequential speed dropped from 200 MB/s to around 175 MB/s and drops below 170 MB/s with a web browser open with several tabs open and the more it fills up, the slower it gets. The noise while doing random operations also increased practically to the level of the one I was using before (this will probably get worse with multiple actuators unless they use some more sound insulation).

The random performance is also still the big limitation which could be greatly alleviated with multiple actuators - but in that respect, and seeing how capacities are set to increase a lot in coming ears, I would go as far as suggest that for desktops they bring back a long dead form factor (for HDD's) - the 5.25' one. That way they would potentially have space to put up to three sets of double actuators in there. We have the desktop cases (well, excluding some fancy new ones), make it happen!

As has been said, I also don't trust SSDs with important data. And the price per GB on an SSD is still too high to replace all HDDs. If I wanted a 2 TB SSD, I'd have to pay at least 600 € for one, but it can go above 700 € for better models. A normal 2 TB HDD costs below 80 € and the WD Black does cost a premium over 100 €, but it's faster and has been a very reliable series for me. And this is for 2 TB capacities, which is nothing extraordinary. You can't even buy higher capacities consumer SSDs anyway.
You should look into a program called Disktrix / ultimate defrag. Moving the crud you dont use the most into the innerrace of the disk and get back some performance.
 
#26 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteWulfe View Post

It's an interesting take on things, that's for sure. Curious what the price increase is going to be though. Like others have said, it can't be too much more than current drives because otherwise it becomes a case of "solid state is faster and cheaper" which is a bad combination to market against.
I will definitely be watching on the price. I already have a 6 and a 8TB storage drive, but I still would like another 8TB drive to have on hand for a backup drive (most likely as a mirror backup to the other 8TB drive). Think I will wait to see how these new HDDs cost first.
 
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