this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Remember Seagate’s Dual Actuator HDDs? They’re Back, in SATA Form (www.youtube.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year 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.