HDD performance doubled: Multi Actuator technology
Seagate has introduced a new technology for hard drives Multi Actuator, which doubled the read / write speed of HDD. To do this, the engineers divided the actuator that moves the magnetic heads into two independent blocks.
What advantages the decision has, we will tell further.
/ Flickr / Christian Riise Wagner / CC
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In a classic HDD, an actuator with magnetic heads is a one-piece design, so all writing / reading heads rotate synchronously. Seagate Multi Actuator technology divides the actuator into two blocks that move independently of each other. How it looks, you can see here .
Two actuators allow you to split a physical disk into two logical ones. This means that the host computer is able to send a couple of requests to the device at the same time.
According to Seagate, this approach has doubled the speed of reading and writing data. However, Reddit users have already expressed their concerns regarding the Multi Actuator, because the technology adds an additional point of failure and in theory increases the risk of information loss.
Seagate says that new drives will work with SAS, SATA or NVMe interfaces, but the range of interfaces can be expanded to meet the wishes of customers.
Interestingly, a patent for a hard disk with several actuators appeared in 1993. Its owner was the company Conner Peripherals, which was founded by one of the founders of Seagate Finis Connor (Finis Conner). However, the technology did not find popularity, as one of Reddit residents believes , due to the high cost of production. And in 1996, Conner Peripherals was absorbed by Seagate Technology.
Such parallelism is necessary by the way in hyper-scalable data centers, where the hosts access data on several hard drives simultaneously.
Aaron Ogus, storage architect at Microsoft Azure, noted that the two drivers will increase IOPS drives and allow virtual infrastructure providers to more efficiently use data storage resources. In this case, we can expect that disks with actuators divided into 3 or more parts will appear in the future.
Seagate says Multi Actuator technology will appear in their products in the near future. We are probably talking about Exos drives that use Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording ( HAMR ) technology to increase HDD capacity. Exos test batches will appear in 2018, and mass production will begin in 2019.
However, according to The Register residents, the Multi Actuator technology will not reach personal computers soon, since home PCs do not generate a large number of overlapping read / write requests, and such a system will be redundant.
What advantages the decision has, we will tell further.
/ Flickr / Christian Riise Wagner / CC
')
In a classic HDD, an actuator with magnetic heads is a one-piece design, so all writing / reading heads rotate synchronously. Seagate Multi Actuator technology divides the actuator into two blocks that move independently of each other. How it looks, you can see here .
Two actuators allow you to split a physical disk into two logical ones. This means that the host computer is able to send a couple of requests to the device at the same time.
According to Seagate, this approach has doubled the speed of reading and writing data. However, Reddit users have already expressed their concerns regarding the Multi Actuator, because the technology adds an additional point of failure and in theory increases the risk of information loss.
Seagate says that new drives will work with SAS, SATA or NVMe interfaces, but the range of interfaces can be expanded to meet the wishes of customers.
Interestingly, a patent for a hard disk with several actuators appeared in 1993. Its owner was the company Conner Peripherals, which was founded by one of the founders of Seagate Finis Connor (Finis Conner). However, the technology did not find popularity, as one of Reddit residents believes , due to the high cost of production. And in 1996, Conner Peripherals was absorbed by Seagate Technology.
Where technology will be applied
Such parallelism is necessary by the way in hyper-scalable data centers, where the hosts access data on several hard drives simultaneously.
Aaron Ogus, storage architect at Microsoft Azure, noted that the two drivers will increase IOPS drives and allow virtual infrastructure providers to more efficiently use data storage resources. In this case, we can expect that disks with actuators divided into 3 or more parts will appear in the future.
Seagate says Multi Actuator technology will appear in their products in the near future. We are probably talking about Exos drives that use Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording ( HAMR ) technology to increase HDD capacity. Exos test batches will appear in 2018, and mass production will begin in 2019.
However, according to The Register residents, the Multi Actuator technology will not reach personal computers soon, since home PCs do not generate a large number of overlapping read / write requests, and such a system will be redundant.
What else do we write in our corporate 1cloud blog:
- How are the drives, or the performance of SSD and HDD
- Cloud Data Storage: Types and Purpose
- Cloud Trends 2017 (Part 1): Key Findings
- Cloud Trends 2017 (Part 2): The Popularity of Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Trends 2017 (Part 3): The Benefits and Challenges of the Clouds
- Everything you need to know about network neutrality: principles and protection
- How to organize a computer class in the cloud
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/345290/
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