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New Seagate Shingled Hard Drive Teardown
New submitter Peter Desnoyers writes: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are starting to hit the market, promising larger drives without heroic (and expensive) measures such as helium fill, but at a cost — data can no longer be over-written in place, requiring SSD-like algorithms to handle random writes.
At the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference in February, researchers from Northeastern University (disclaimer — I'm one of them) dissected shingled drive performance both figuratively and literally, using both micro-benchmarks and a window cut in the drive to uncover the secrets of Seagate's first line of publicly-available SMR drives.
TL;DR: It's a pretty good desktop drive — with write cache enabled (the default for non-server setups) and an intermittent workload it performs quite well, handling bursts of random writes (up to a few tens of GB total) far faster than a conventional drive — but only if it has long powered-on idle periods for garbage collection. Reads and large writes run at about the same speed as on a conventional drive, and at $280 it costs less than a pair of decent 4TB drives. For heavily-loaded server applications, though, you might want to wait for the next generation. Here are a couple videos (in 16x slow motion) showing the drive in action — sequential read after deliberately fragmenting the drive, and a few thousand random writes.
At the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference in February, researchers from Northeastern University (disclaimer — I'm one of them) dissected shingled drive performance both figuratively and literally, using both micro-benchmarks and a window cut in the drive to uncover the secrets of Seagate's first line of publicly-available SMR drives.
TL;DR: It's a pretty good desktop drive — with write cache enabled (the default for non-server setups) and an intermittent workload it performs quite well, handling bursts of random writes (up to a few tens of GB total) far faster than a conventional drive — but only if it has long powered-on idle periods for garbage collection. Reads and large writes run at about the same speed as on a conventional drive, and at $280 it costs less than a pair of decent 4TB drives. For heavily-loaded server applications, though, you might want to wait for the next generation. Here are a couple videos (in 16x slow motion) showing the drive in action — sequential read after deliberately fragmenting the drive, and a few thousand random writes.
One thing I've tended to wonder, why have a single read-write needle on conventional drives (especially in multi-platter situations). Why not have two needles, one on either side so they can't touch.
Alternately, why not a "track" that runs across the drive with shuttles on either side to perform the reads/writes. You could have two perpendicular tracks to increase performance
I've worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies. All used spinning tape. And nearly everywhere I've worked has used tape. It's cheaper and easier to buy tapes. You sound like a salesman, but I've never seen the numbers work for an off-site storage, Tapes are cheaper than hard drive storage, and more controlable (having them physically stored where you want, restoring only what you want, good for lawsuits).
Learn to love Alaska
Who still uses tape? Seriously, no data centric company on the planet still uses tape, its easier and cheaper to throw a bunch of large drives and a big fat pipe to offsite storage than deal with a tape robot.
People still using tape are doing so because they haven't moved on and like pain or are just ignorant of the alternatives.
Google, probably the most "data centric" company on earth, that's who!
http://highscalability.com/blo...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.