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Remember Seagate’s Dual Actuator HDDs? They’re Back, in SATA Form (www.youtube.com)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by lemann@lemmy.one to c/datahoarder@lemmy.ml
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What do you think of dual actuator hard drives? I never knew these even existed...

Here's a quick summary of the vid for those who want a TL;DW:

  • Dual actuator drives are a single drive with two actuator arms inside
  • These arms have their own platters, each with access to half of the drive's capacity
  • The SAS version shows up as two separate drives: one for each actuator
  • The SATA version shows up as a single drive, however can be partitioned at a specific LBA near the middle to use both actuators independently
  • Linux kernel updated to support these drives better when queuing commands
  • Capable of saturating a 5gbit SATA link

Personally, my concern is RAID setups, particularly in a SAS config. Will filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS know that two storage devices are the same physical drive... aside from that, and concern about more mechanical parts, this looks exciting especially for sequential speed throughput!

EDIT: fix typos

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[-] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago

The amazing thing about those are that they are halfing the rebuild time. With large drives you get rebuild time of over 24 hours which is actually frightening.

Setup is a one time thing and yes you need to be carefull about it but i bet software support will come as soon as those get more mainstream.

[-] netburnr@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's a Seagate, i would never buy it. Host (now wd) for life.

[-] roawre@feddit.ch 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Care to elaborate? Seagate is one of my favorite brand. And i read a lots of reviews and tech articles before purchasing any components. I am curious to learn about what i have missed about them. Thx

[-] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 8 points 9 months ago

Not OP, but this comes up regularly.

A lot of people have very strong opinions of brands based on a woefully inadequate sample size. Typically this comes from a higher than expected failure rate, possibly even much higher than expected. It could've been a bad model, a bad batch at manufacturing, improper handling from the retailer, or even an improper running environment. But even the greediest data hoarders only have a few dozen drives, often in just a couple of environments and use-cases.

Very few of these results are actually meaningful trends. For every person that swears by WD and will never touch a Seagate, there's someone else that swears by Seagate and will never touch another WD. HGST and Toshiba seem to have a very slight edge on reliability, but it's very small. And there are still people that refuse to touch them because of the "Death Star" drives many years ago.

It's also very difficult to predict which models will have high failure rates. By the time it becomes clear one is a lemon, they're already EoL.

I avoid buying WD new because of their (IMHO completely illegal) stance on warranty, but I'm comfortable buying their stuff used.

Don't worry too much about brand. Instead go for specs and needs. Follow a good backup strategy and you'll be fine

[-] LeafOnTheWind@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

HGST is a part of WD and has been for quite a while.

But a big part of why the average consumer drive kind of sucks is that there is way more money in enterprise level drives so very little resources get put toward client drives.

[-] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 months ago

Owned by, yes. Have their operations actually been integrated though? I haven't checked in a long time, but it was still a separate division last time I did.

[-] LeafOnTheWind@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

It's integrated. Only a few things internally are still labeled HGST.

[-] roawre@feddit.ch 1 points 9 months ago

Thank you

[-] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 3 points 9 months ago

Yep. Seagate have earned their reputation. Pass.

[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 months ago

Care to elaborate?

[-] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 0 points 9 months ago

They've had some of the highest failure rates among drive manufacturers.

[-] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Timd to update your criteria, friend. Seagate hasn't been top of the failure stack for like 8 years now. The 3TB scandal era is long since passed. Now it's WD who has been shitting on quality control, sending out faulty SSD's that wipe user data, bait-and-switching HDD customers with a cheaper, much worse performing technology (SMR) WITHOUT TELLING THEM, them basically blowing corporate raspberries at everyone when people complain.

While i agree they were the best, HGST also hasn't even existed as a non-WD product for years....

[-] yote_zip@pawb.social 3 points 9 months ago

ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven't already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don't care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I'd rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust's short lifespan as-is.

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[-] TCB13@lemmy.world -2 points 9 months ago

Never ever going to buy Seagate again after the crap they've pulled on their Exos drives.

They simply decided to completely trash SMART and spin down commands. The drives simply won't give you useful SMART data nor they won't ever actually spin down, you can't force it, the drive will report is as if it was spun down but in reality its still spinning.

this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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