Seagate MACH.2 Multi Actuator [H]DD Interest?

[Neapolitan6th]

I was curious if any others were anticipating Seagate's MACH.2 launch? SSDs may be all the rage, but there's something [H]ard about all those moving parts. (Probably for the same reasons I get excited over old vacuum tube gear).

It sounds as though they are pretty focused on releasing these drives for Enterprise, but it would be neat to put these in a consumer box too. From what I read the drives act as 2 seperate HDDs as far the OS is concerned so they would have to be put in a raid configuration to make use of faster reads/writes.

 

[pentiumiiislota]

I haven't heard of this so thanks for posting about this. Looks like i need to do some reading about this.

 

[drescherjm]

I am interested however I would like to see blackblaze use these for 3 years in their pods before I would begin to purchase. Just to make sure that the dual actuator design does not greatly increase the chance of failure.

 

[mwroobel]

I am interested however I would like to see blackblaze use these for 3 years in their pods before I would begin to purchase. Just to make sure that the dual actuator design does not greatly increase the chance of failure.

While I am sure BB will eventually (if they aren't currently under NDA) test them, until the current 9 platter maximum increases these will always cost more because the platters have to be broken up into even numbers (8 in mach.2 vs 9 in standard enterprise drives). The overarching concern for a bulk storage operation is good performance with high capacity, and they would currently be going backwards in TB/slot until they can go to 10 platters. Additionally, SATA doesn't support LUNs which is how they are addressing the SAS drives, and you will need HBA buy-in for maximum performance. You can read the FAQ here from Seagate.