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Seagate's New 'SkyHawk AI' Disk Drive Is Just a Slightly Higher Speced Version of Its Predecessor (theregister.co.uk)
ourlovecanlastforeve shares a report from The Register, where Chris Mellor takes a look at Seagate's recently launched "SkyHawk" and "SkyHawk AI" HDDs. After closer inspection, Mellor concludes that the "AI" variant has a more buzz-worthy name and "slightly higher numbers on the specs" than its "SkyHawk" brethren. From the report: Seagate has bolted "AI" to its SkyHawk disk drive brand, saying it's better suited for next-generation deep learning and video analytics. The marketing department breathlessly describes it as "the first drive created specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled video surveillance solutions." Sai Varanasi, VP product line management, burbled in the same fashion: "We are excited to introduce smart, purpose-built SkyHawk AI solutions that expand the design space for our customers and partners, allowing them to implement next-generation deep learning and video analytics applications." How so? Seagate says the new drive's "high throughput and enhanced caching deliver low latency and excellent random read performance to quickly locate and deliver video images and footage analysis." Both SkyHawk and SkyHawk AI have a 256MB cache buffer and 4.16ms average latency. Where it does differ from SkyHawk is having a higher 550TB/year workload and 2 million hours mean-time-before-failure rating, compared to 180TB/year and a million hours. It's been given a five-year limited warranty and a two-year Seagate Rescue Services contract is included with the drive. In other words the SkyHawk AI is more robust than the standard SkyHawk and transfers data 1.9 per cent faster. Otherwise it seems identical.
Marketing drones frequently take liberties with reality.
HDD margin grows from 1.5% to 1.53%
This just in: marketing team full of bullshit.
This is my story, I submitted it to Slashdot, but it says it was submitted by someone else and has a different title than I submitted it with.
crossing the line first. gold medal.
No HDD has remotely near the throughput needed to justify the claim it should be "used for AI".
Samsung EVO M.2 is orders of magnitude more appropriate for data analysis because it has orders of magnitude higher throughout.
What a ridiculous marketing gimmick.
. . . the "SkyHawk Blockchain" . . . but it will cost 400% more . . .
. . . maybe they will also offer a hybrid model: "SkyHawk Blockchain AI" . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Coming soon. SkyHawk Blockchain. Same shit, 3.8% faster.
Look, it's really fucking simple ... all marketing, especially for technology, is purely bullshit. The job of marketing is to make something which is really just an incremental improvement sound like revolutionary new technology.
And this is usually done by taking on the latest buzz-word du jour, and saying the product has been built for that.
Honestly, who the hell is in any way surprised by this? Yes, marketing makes BS claims, that's what they do. I'm betting your average marketing person can't tell the truth at the best of times, because the profession is pretty much stretching the truth and ensuring you stay just inside of any applicable laws, or just outside enough that you might get away with it.
>" In other words the SkyHawk AI is more robust than the standard SkyHawk and transfers data 1.9 per cent faster. Otherwise it seems identical."
And it might actually be identical in every way. This is not uncommon in many industries- to sell identical machines, parts, products, whatever, but with glitzy marketing, different packaging, and a better warranty. In such cases, one is actually just paying more to get a longer warranty.
I am just speculating here, I have no evidence either way with the SkyHawk AI. Perhaps they use better construction, higher quality bearings, improved assembly, or maybe tweaked firmware. But if they don't specifically mention HOW this drive is actually better (what hardware or methods make it different), then I would be very skeptical about it actually being any better (at least as far as MTBF).
It's time to stop pretending these marketing buzzwords ever meant anything in the first place. Bring on the "5G" smartphones and all the "Smart" shit.
Only by reducing them to absurdity can we destroy the influence of these idiotic language tricks.
The label on the box.
....
Next you're doing to tell me the NAS drives are just slightly different to non-NAS drives, and Surveillance drives are only slightly different from regular drives too.
To be fair, the workload figure of 550TB/year is quite a bit higher than 180TB/year.
It's like comparing a consumer grade printer with an office grade printer. They might have the same speed, image quality and maybe even warranty period, but the office grade one is going to last a lot longer if it's printing hundreds or thousands of pages a day.
Even power tools are like that. The warranties of cheap products exclude commercial use, since they'll fail pretty quick if used all day every day.
Except for all of the differences, they're exactly the same! Just like apples and oranges!
On one hand, it IS frustrating to see so many purpose-made (or marketed, rather) hard drives, but I think it's just a sign of maturation. For example, think about pencils. They've been around for thousands of years. There are cheap everyday pencils, good everyday pencils, drafting pencils, art pencils with various softnesses of lead, mechanical pencils with 0.5mm, 0.7mm, 0.9mm leads, carpenter's pencils that are extra flat so they don't roll away, colored pencils, colored mechanical pencils, round pencils, hexagonal pencils etc, etc, etc. Many of them are specialized for the use case. Sure a carpenter could just use a regular #2, but he'd probably get frustrated and need to buy lots of them as they rolled away and got lost. Sure you could store your DVR'ed shows on a super-fast SSD, but why when, for the same money, you could get a slow, low-power spinny disk that does just fine and lets you store WAY more stuff?
Sure it's still a lot of marketing wank for now, but I don't think it's 100% marketing wank.
I've had 8 out of 8 Seagate 3TB drive failures, and 0 out of 4 Western Digital drives in the same time. Now I'm using only WD and Toshiba drives.
I'm not the only one, its the same issue with all of them, they go clicky clicky and the surface is damaged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI5F9jl27-U
It's so bad that the drive I put in a replacement failed when the raid was rebuilding. Really they are THAT bad.
Translation: A really really big seagate customer that does video surveillance and analytics ("AI") was not satisfied with drive reliability and performance. Since it was a really really big customer they got seagate to build them a special model. Seagate also sells this model to other customers and their salesdrones got overly excited about the "AI" angle.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The summary says the marketers claimed "excellent random read performance to quickly locate and deliver video". Which is it, random read or video? Because video is about throughput. Random read is data that fits in a few blocks - a few 512 byte or 4K blocks. Once you get into hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes, a million consecutive blocks, that's not random.
Are you even reading Backblaze's HD reviews before you buy storage? Have a look, and then decide if you want to buy the shoddy quality that Seagate's drives are. The reviews makes it clear that there are three brands that stand out above all others: Hitachi, their other brand HGST, and Toshiba.
The other drives from primarily Seagate, IBM, and Western Digital fail early and are very expensive when taken the amount of storage and life-expectancy in account.
(HGST belongs to Western Digital or Seagate, but it's a wholly separate unit with their own technology and manufacturing, which is why they still put out superior drives.)
on my new 4K TV
This beats Seagate's previous MTBF of around 3 days.
There used to be a pizza joint in Cambridge, MA, USA called "Hi-Fi Pizza". I think it's gone now. AFAIK it contained no audio components, kind of like how these drives contain no AI.
Now I have a hankering for "AI Pizza".
Since this is Seagate we're talking about, I imagine the new AI will determine the worst possible time for the drive to fail (sometime after the warranty expires and right at the same time as all of the other drives in the raid array).
Seagate has airbrushed "GW" onto its solid state disk drive brand, saying it's better suited for Climate Change research. The marketing department throatily rasps it as "the first drive created specifically for the wide range of intelligence routinely encountered in climate debates."
But it's more than just re-branding for the virtue market. SSDGW virtue signal to noise ratio has been reduced and performance degradation has been enhanced, offering a failure profile that begins to rise steadily before the dawn of accurate satellite measurement, reaching peak failure during the Medieval Warm Period. Utilizing lopsided NAND gates, the drive cannot be guaranteed not to adjust past figures downwards, making it invaluable for preparing historical revisions to the surface temperature datasets. "This is our first drive with no guarantee or warranty, and we're surprised with its popularity within the academic community."
Drive firmware supports a new AlGorical Control Panel, special driver and utility for adjusting parameters. "We have made data degradation completely transparent and user friendly," the marketing dope said. "The driver is there principally to thwart the S.M.A.R.T. standard of drive integrity monitoring, these units seem to blow it out completely." From the Control Panel you can change the date ranges of the failure, but be warned: "parameters are stored by the same circuitry that manage the data. So you'd better check them often!"
It's two drives in one! The SSDGW can also be run in 'time-disable mode' which flattens the performance degradation to a uniform high level, making it a Virtual Plausible Deniability Drive. "Currently in beta, the VPDD is an exciting new way to store Secretary of State emails, FOIA requests, JFK files... or even HD surveillance footage if you'd rather have a grainy result."
When challenged with the idea that inferior products often exhibit these features, the marketing dope tossed his head and whinnied. "SSDGW is a premium product. Uniform degradation profiles are difficult to achieve on the production line. I'm sure there will be knock-off counterfeit SSDGWs out there but buyer beware. The first time you realize you've been deceived is when you get all your data back." He added, "And then it's too late."
The marketing dope also dropped hints of future Seagate products, including "a solid state disk that has an embedded mechanical device that will occasionally begin to click loudly at brief intervals, just to scare the shit out of you."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
A million hours is around 114 years. The warranty should be at least 100 years.
I had a drive with a MTBF of 65 years, with a three year warranty. It failed at three years three months.
Obviously the warranty length is a much better indicator of the manufacturer's confidence in their product.
http://www.datarecovery.hr/bud...