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posted by CoolHand on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-can-make-our-tech-sound-funny dept.

Western Digital is now shipping 14 TB hard drives. The products use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which can slow down re-writes:

Western Digital has started to ship its new HGST Ultrastar Hs14 hard drives, promoted as being suitable for cloud datacenters and for hyperscale developments. The capacity increase from its predecessor, the Ultrastar Ha10, from 10TB to 14 TB offers a significant performance improvement. The new 14 TB HDD is based on shingled magnetic recording technology, which is a system that naturally focuses more on sequential write performance. These drives will only be available with host management, which means it will not be available to general consumers, but only to select customers of HGST.

The HGST Ultrastar Hs14 relies on Western Digital's fourth-generation HelioSeal enterprise platform which integrates eight platters and features various internal components specially designed for such hard drives. The new helium-filled HDD has a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 512 MB cache. and numerous enhancements when it comes to reliability and durability of the drive. As with other HGST enterprise-class HDDs, the Ultrastar Hs14 is rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and comes with a five-year warranty.

Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Western Digital Begins Shipping 12 TB Helium-Filled Drives with 8 Platters
Seagate Launches Consumer-Oriented 12 TB Drives
Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:29PM (4 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:29PM (#591413) Journal

    shingled magnetic recording (SMR)... can slow down re-writes

    Given that SMR records one thing partially underneath another underneath another, and all those others have to be moved out of the way to re-write something old, saying that it "can slow down" rewrites is sort of like saying that filling your car with lead "can potentially result in lower top speeds and possibly lower gas mileage."

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  • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Friday November 03 2017, @12:41AM (1 child)

    by KiloByte (375) on Friday November 03 2017, @12:41AM (#591430)

    Also, SMR really, really sucks when used with a regular filesystem. Without specific tuning for SMR, f2fs fares best by a good margin despite having been designed for a completely different use case (flash with weak FTL). In theory, btrfs should shine as well but this is not the case -- and no one implemented such SMR tuning yet.

    You want random writes (even to structs like inodes) be converted into a long linear write, appending only within a specific zone.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @12:52AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 03 2017, @12:52AM (#591445) Journal

    I strongly hedge when writing summaries. "which can slow down re-writes" replaced something like "which has lower write speeds" in draft 1. In fact, initial sequential writes for this product are up by a lot from the Ultrastar Ha10.

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    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 03 2017, @11:27AM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 03 2017, @11:27AM (#591630) Journal

      "which can slow down re-writes"

      Ah, my post was part clarification, part silliness. No criticism intended--and you're right, rewrites are the case where SMR doesn't shine (not writing in general).