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Seagate Demonstrates HDD with PCIe NVMe Interface
Seagate has demonstrated the industry's first hard disk drive connected to a host using a PCIe interface at the Open Compute Project Summit. Like solid-state drives, the experimental hard drive uses the NVMe protocol to operate alongside SSDs seamlessly. Usage of a single protocol for different types of storage devices will greatly simplify datacenters.
The experimental [HDD] is based on Seagate's proprietary controller that supports all three major protocols, including SAS, SATA, and NVMe over a 'native NVMe port,' and does not require any bridges.
[...] Modern HDDs can barely saturate even a single PCIe 2.0 link, but future multi-actuator HDDs promise to be much faster, so 6 Gbps provided by SATA or 12 Gbps offered by SAS might not be enough at some point. To that end, the industry has to think about future interfaces to connect hard drives, and PCIe seems like a natural choice. Furthermore, as SSDs are gaining traction in datacenters, the NVMe protocol becomes pervasive, so it makes sense to adopt it for HDDs. This is why NVMe 2.0 adds hard drive support.
NVM Express aka Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification.
Also at Phoronix.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 12 2021, @05:50AM (7 children)
It's seemingly to get everything on NVMe, but the multi-actuator technology could actually increase sequential speeds to faster than at least SATA.
The fastest single-actuator drives seem to be around 260 MB/s max (e.g. Seagate IronWolf Pro 18 TB). The Seagate Exos 2X14 has two actuators for up to 524 MB/s.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/323072-seagate-specs-the-mach-2-the-worlds-fastest-hard-drive [extremetech.com]
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(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday November 12 2021, @08:23AM (6 children)
"Seagate cautions against relying on one drive for redundancy, given that dual actuators don’t mean the entire physical drive is duplicated/protected."
I would question relying on anything they made. Only drives I had to upgrade the firmware on to prevent them bricking themselves randomly on boot. Then everyone of the damn things died anyways conveniently just out of warranty oh now I think about one in warranty that died later all the other 9 or so dead with no replacement. Never have bought another of theirs since. I have had the odd western digital die but not the whole lot of them dead like their garbage.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday November 12 2021, @09:18AM (3 children)
Anecdata. How many millions of these things are they selling each year?
These multi-actuator drives probably aren't going to normal people though, and should be of a higher quality.
Also, anything that Seagate does will inevitably be copied by Western Digital, and vice versa.
Western Digital to Demo Dual-Actuator HDDs Next Week: Double the Actuators for Double the Perf [anandtech.com] (2019)
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(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday November 13 2021, @02:15AM (2 children)
Here ya go, data-data.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2021/ [backblaze.com]
They have stats going back several years, but the results are usually about the same -- Seagates have the highest fail rate.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 13 2021, @06:36PM (1 child)
WDC had high failure rates too: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/ [backblaze.com]
For some reason Backblaze stopped using WD drives for a few years: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/ [backblaze.com]
I haven't had good experiences with WDC from that era either.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 14 2021, @01:10AM
Backblaze does whatever is cheaper for them. They will purchase drives that are less reliable or they suspect might be less reliable if they are cheaper, and the money they save is more than the cost of dealing with a higher failure rate in their data centers. Seagate is often the cheapest, so Backblaze will still buy them.
For personal use, random drive failures are annoying so it's worth the extra money to buy something that's not Seagate.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Saturday November 13 2021, @01:09AM (1 child)
We had an array of drives fail, from several brands.
In one case, we heard a pallet of drives had been dropped. The drives appeared to be ok at first, but had a huge failure rate about a year out.
So the question is, is that model terrible with widespread problems or did you have an isolated problem (and a manufacturer not standing behind the product)?
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Saturday November 13 2021, @01:55AM
"So the question is, is that model terrible with widespread problems or did you have an isolated problem (and a manufacturer not standing behind the product)?"
Only the single model total garbage, I still have three of the drives that replaced them drives going 10+ years later. The others were sold off after upgrading to larger models which have since been upgraded to larger models two or three years ago. Out of them dozen or two only a couple have failed both still under warranty if my memory is correct. Them Seagate drives as I said only one in warranty the rest just out of it. As long as I live they will never get another cent of my money.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen