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
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
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.
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.
It’s integrated. Only a few things internally are still labeled HGST.
Thank you