Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Remember Seagate’s Dual Actuator HDDs? They’re Back, in SATA Form”.
18 terabytes Mach 2, the exos 2×18 Dual actuator, it sure looks like mechanical hard drives, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. But what if you could double the performance of a mechanical, hard drive? That’S what dual actuator drives do dual actuator drives are a long overdue technology. This is a SATA version of a dual actuator hard drive and 18 terabytes 18 terabytes is sort of the floor. We’Re going to see capacities go even Beyond this. This is actually a recertified Drive. I bought these worked so well from seate. They sent me some SAS versions of of these.
To review that uh, I decided to buy the SATA version as well, because everybody was really excited and then seate sent me some more dual. Actuator drives, so I actually have a bunch of these we’re going to take a look cuz using the SATA version of the drive is a little bit more interesting and a little different than the SAS version. This actually just shows up as one drive, unlike the SATA version uh for for those of you not in the know, you’re like what the drive shows up as two drives.
If you have a SAS version of the drive, that’s actually really handy, because then you can deal with the fact that you’ve got two actuators two physical drives and one drive you can handle that. However, you want in software but for SATA drives. Sata doesn’t have that option, so these drives uh deal with that a little bit more.
Cleverly, let’s discuss okay, so this shows up as one giant 18 tbte hard drive. But if you create two partitions, you can access the partitions independently, yeah. That’S what I’m, showing you here on crystal dis, Mark we’re running two Crystal dis Mark routines on this disc, on one single disc, and yet each one of these routines is able to retrieve 250 megabytes per second from each half of the disc. To make sure that you understand this, there’s two sets of read r heads on two sets of platters inside the drive. It’S not like two sets of read RADS can read all of the platters the drives and the platters go together. So you have a front half of the drive partition and a back half of the drive partition and each half of the drive is basically independent. So you create two partitions and then, if you create a raid, zero of those two partitions you’ll get double. The performance turns out.
This is really easy to do. On Native Linux, we’ve got a shell script on the Forum. If you’re setting up say Linux MD, you can use Linux, MD or lvm and tell it hey. These are uh dual actuator hard drives. Here is the geometry layout of the drive and it’ll figure it out and then you’re off to the races. The really exciting thing about that as a practical matter is, if you have, if you have a Nas or network storage, it takes just three of these drives to saturate a 10 gabit ethernet connection yeah. So, if you’re doing something like with the sonology ds1618 plus, that’s got the new faster uh drive in it you’re going to have to go to the command line on the sonology.
To set this up. The sonology goey does not yet support this, but I’ve got the full walkthrough on the level one forums you just need to make sure that the uh redundancy partitions are both on the same physical drive so that you can replace a drive uh most anology Nas have At least four Bays, so you can just add like if you have a failure, you just add a drive into the fourth Bay and let it finish resynchronizing and then you can pull the drive that you think died and then that if you make a mistake, it It doesn’t really matter, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’S talk dual actuators having dual actuators as a practical matter means that the time that it takes to read all of the information off of this disc is cut in half it’s half the time.
It also means that for seate certifying and testing these drives also takes less time. Half time is which is nice for them, but the fact that we have a mechanical, hard drive, a single mechanical hard drive, will now saturate its 6 gbit per second SATA link. Sata 3 6 gbit we’ve been stuck at that SATA speed forever and now you’re telling me that we have a single drive that is going to saturate that SATA link, I’m telling you yes. Another interesting note is that the Linux kernel, as of I think, 6.1 or 6.2 uh added special support for dual actuator, drives it’ll work. If you have an older Linux kernel and a device based on an older Linux kernel, but specifically what it does, is it reserves space in the command Cube, see with SATA drives, you can send a bunch of commands to the drive and the commands will buffer on The drive but the drive might service those commands out of order if it sees a more efficient way to do that, cuz we’re waiting on mechanical Parts here. What the change to the Linux kernel does.
Is it reserves some space in the buffer? So if you have a a workload that really heavily loads one side of the drive, it leaves some buffer space in the command queue for the other side to try to keep both sides of the drive uh loaded. The reason that you want to do that is because, if the buffer were completely filled for one side of the drive, the other side of the drive would be idle and farther down the queue in terms of what’s queued on the konel side, as opposed to what’s Queued on the drive further down the queue there might have been something the colonel could send to the drive to make the other side busy, while the first side was pegged. So the fact that the colonel is now smart enough to say yeah those LBA sectors can be busy at the same time as these other LBA sectors.
It’S nice to see those changes in the Linux kernel mechanical drives for bulk storage, not really going anywhere. It’S also doubling in terms of iops. If you’re thinking you can deploy a dual actuator drive for your games, Drive well.
Media is probably a better choice or your Home Server storage, Appliance bulk storage, that kind of thing even the most gargantuan uh steam collection, you’re, going to put you’re going to want to put the games that you play on flash storage, you could archive your saves or, Or do backups or something like that to Mechanical storage, but there’s still enough of a performance difference for random IO that you’ll want flash as opposed to Mechanical storage, but the fact that you can get 18 TB dual actuator hard drives like this is a Precision mechanical Instrument for way less than $ 400 I get these recertified drives for, like $ 200 uh, that’s pretty amazing and the recertified drives still have over a one-year warranty. I think that when I checked these online uh, these still had 20 months of of warranty remaining. Of course, the new drives have a much longer warranty, because seate exos and the exos line is designed for reliability and and long term usage and the business use case.
The Enterprise use case so little bit more stringent in terms of quality control and everything else. If you have something you want me to try with a dual actuator hard drive or a dual actuator configuration, let me know I would be glad to do that. For me, I’ve been really enjoying the performance.
The fact that three of these drives can saturate 10 gbit ethernet means that I need to upgrade and have more machines on the 100 gbit segment of my network 10 gbit is too slow. What a what? What a time to be alive. A mechanical, hard drive, a mechanical hard drive, is able to seek and retrieve information at over a billion bytes per second, we live in the future, need more more all right. I’M wi this level one! This has been a look at the SATA version of the Dual actuator hard drives. If this sort of interests, you be sure to check out the other video that we did on the SAS version, if you have a 45 drive, storinator or other machine, a Linux machine that you’re looking to set up with these, the SATA version of these drives do Work, just fine in those drives be aware that they do use a little bit more power, the older version of these drives. This is the second generation dual actuator, the first generation dual actuator used quite a bit more power.
These use a little bit more power do be aware that some Drive chassis have really done the math on the maximum power loading for mechanical hard drives. That’S really the only rough spot you could run into some disc shelves. Weren’T designed for the power load of SATA discs that need as much power as they do, but generally those disc shelves were designed with, like 10K SAS drives in mind, which use a lot more power than these.
So it’s probably fine, even if you’re putting these in in an older enclosure. If you are doing something like planning to build a server around old Enterprise gear, I would definitely recommend that you go with the SAS version of the drive, not SATA, for a whole host of reasons, none of which are to do with the fact that this shows Up as one volume and you’ll have to manage, with LBA sector mapping or the script that we have a level one forums, it’s just that SAS and Enterprise gear is generally a little uh more robust, but the SATA version works just fine in desktop computers, desktop class Nases, like the SAS version generally, doesn’t work in in a sonology Nas unless you have one of the Enterprise tenology nases, which is designed for SAS storage as opposed to SATA. But you can still use dual actuator drives in your SATA enclosure.
If you really don’t want to mess with getting the absolute maximum performance out of dual actuator drives, they are Plug and Play you can plug and play into a desktop Nas. You just won’t get the performance benefit. The drive will still run at half speed. Basically, but if you’re willing to hop into the command line, do some partitioning do some some setup from the command line you can set these up so that they’ll run at effectively 2x speed in your regular old desktop Nas.
This true for Asus store as well Asus store, is a little closer to a stock Linux configuration and so setting these up for use in Asus store is also pretty straightforward. There’S a guide for that on the level one Forum, but dual actuator hard drives. If you’re picking up a mechanical hard drive in 2023 and it’s not dual actuator, just let me put it another way: double the performance of a mechanical, hard drive, double double performance. Mechanical hard drive, it’s you’ll be able to read in the entire disc in less than 24 hours, because it’s 18 terabytes, you know double the speed cuz when we’re talking about 18 terabytes 250 megabytes per second, it’s going to take a lot of seconds to read in 18 trillion bytes, I’m just saying: I’m one this level one signing out and you can find me playing with more dual actuator hardops, all right I’ll, see you later .